Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present its third solo show with Marshall Brown, Je est un autre, in Galleries 1 and 2. Featuring two new projects, Brown uses the historically disruptive properties of collage and montage to create new spaces, forms, and narratives that embody new relationships between the one and the many. Je est un autre translates roughly to “I is another,” a phrase borrowed from French poet Arthur Rimbaud, and speaks to Brown’s rejection of purist or reductionist worldviews through his hybrid works. The exhibition opens on June 7th with a free and public reception from 5 to 8pm and runs through July 27th.
In Gallery 1, Brown expands upon his abstraction of architectural photography with a new series of collages that create even more dynamic perceptions of space, scale, and orientation than his Chimera collage series from 2014. In this new series Brown samples imagery from photographs taken during the golden age of post-war architectural photography. His curated fragments, culled from monographs on significant figures from the history of architectural photography, are hand-cut and fused together onto Arches hot press watercolour paper. Looming facades, stark shadows, and structural details seamlessly support one another to form unique architectural spaces and narratives — offering no site or function, Brown’s assemblages look toward new, boundless spaces. From Zach Mortice, Architect Magazine, in 2017: “Brown isn’t trying to make buildings more like collages. He’s trying to get us to acknowledge that buildings are collages, and that the future of ‘making new history’ comes from reassembling the pieces of the old.”
