Janine Brown’s variety shows
JANINE BROWN APPLIES COMPLETELY DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT EXHIBITIONS
Keeping up with Janine Brown means keeping busy.
Since the beginning of the year the artist who lives in Fairfield and has a studio in Bridgeport’s AmFab building has had work in juried shows at the Rowayton Art Center, the Ridgefield Guild of Artists and the Silvermine Art Center. The thing is, none of it looks the same.
Some of her newest work, a pair of 2019 abstract paintings from a series she calls Pattern Play, were in the Ridgefield members show that ran online most of April. Each canvas is populated with dozens of shapes, some open, some solid, that appear to have been laid out for consideration, like letters imagined for a new alphabet. Both Ridgefield paintings are done in the same color code of repeated greens, blues and yellows.
Completely different are Brown’s “Social Distortions” portraits. Her artist’s statement says they are a commentary on the masks people wear on social media. Maybe so, but Brown’s vivid portraits are too extreme for any Facebook profile.
“Lady Luck,” one of two portraits in the Rowayton “Spring” exhibit currently online, shows a young woman whose skin is mottled gray, except around the eyes, where it is white. She wears oversized ornaments. A gold headband befitting of Wonder Woman looks borrowed from a giant’s wristwatch. Her earrings are dancers in feathered skirts.
Not really, says Brown. The earrings are actually hanging lamps lifted from an interior design magazine. So is most everything else, including the woman’s eyes. Brown bases her portraits on commercially photographed models (some are by Keyvan Behpour, an AmFab neighbor), then begins the transformative process of disguise.
“I collage magazine pieces on top of the original image. I cut out eyes, I find some that fit. I’m making (the portrait) by putting things on top of it,” she says.
Brown, who once worked in the fashion industry, may know what she’s added, but Lady Luck’s eyes tease a viewer into searching for the real person behind the kabukilike mask. Two more portraits, “Diamond Diva” and “Dame Hilton” appeared in this year’s Silvermine new members show. Enigmatic and regal, both hold bejeweled pets; a cat for Diva, and a brown Chihuahua for Hilton.
Brown also uses a kind of photographic portraiture in “The Wallflower Project,” perhaps her most ambitious series to date. But where her “Social Distortions” sparkle, her “Wallflower” people are mostly gray-faced and veiled, significantly, by overlays of wallpaper patterns. Several appeared in the recent “HeArt & Mind” exhibit at Silvermine and several more were slated for a now postponed #MeToo themed show that was to have opened this month at Ridgefield.
The Silvermine exhibit also introduced what Brown considers the capstone of the “Wallflower Project.” It is a room-sized installation called “Wallflower at the Dance “that she spent four years hand crafting. At Silvermine, it was located in the far corner of the inner-most gallery. White-walled, it looked like it might barricade a space undergoing maintenance. But viewers who dared step inside encountered a figure in a white gown, frozen in a dancing posture.
Brown crocheted the floral gown herself. She also crocheted the 100 silvery tear-drop shaped globes hanging from the ceiling like disco lights. The floor looked too soft to stand on. The walls looked soft and floral too, as if papered in chenille. A murmuring sound track repeated the words, “Why are they looking at me like that?”
At the exhibit opening, a dancer wearing the dress circulated through the crowd. She was Kelley Ryan from Stratford who performs in a two-and-a-half minute video version of the installation. Brown expected the video to screen this June at a Los Angeles gallery. It has now been postponed, like four other of her shows.
Brown learned some of her craft skills growing up on an Iowa farm. “It was great,” she says, “but if you wanted to be in fashion, Iowa wasn’t the place for it.”
She went straight from Iowa State, where she got an arts degree in 1989, to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. She worked in fashion, got an MBA at NYU and married, moving to Connecticut in 2001, the year twin sons were born.
Her first studio was in the Remington Arms Factory building and one of her early projects consisted of deliberately blurred photographs and paintings of old machinery stored there. Next came the move to the AmFab building. She was working on “Mad Mags,” a series of “whimsical landscapes” abstracted from background images in fashion publications, when she got nudged toward Wallflowers.
“I had somebody come to my studio and critique my work. They told me everything looked like it was too easy for me and I needed to go deeper and be more personal if I wanted to take the next step,” she recalls.
Much later, she was chatting with the Westport artist Nina Bentley at an art opening when the Bentley mentioned that women with handsome husbands like them often feel ignored at parties. “That conversation stuck with me. I started thinking, how can I turn it into a meaningful project,” Brown says.
She began researching the history of the term wallflower (it dates from the Victorian era) and wallpaper and experimenting with a cheap pinhole camera (the kind used to view solar eclipses). “I came up with the crazy idea of doing a double exposure, where the model would fade into the wallpaper,” she says.
Her first models were AmFab neighbors and she continued the project in Los Angeles, where she says her husband, who was working on an investment fund, was often mistaken for an actor. It was there that she built the Wallflower installation. An L.A. critic reviewing the portraits asked, accurately, whether the subjects “are emerging from or fading into their backgrounds?”
All the Wallflowers are identified by their first names. Brown says some viewers like their haunting quality while others find them too ghostly for comfort. She sees her abstract paintings as more marketable than her “Wallflowers” or “Social Distortions.”
“It’s almost like having two different personalties,” she says. “I’ve stopped working on the Wallflower Project. I’ve done it for 10 years. I was becoming so involved I was almost becoming a wallflower.”