Michael Brown
19 Jun - 31 Jul 2008
"The People!s Playground"
June 19- July 31, 2008
Summer hours from July 7 - August 31: Mon - Fri, 10am – 6pm
Reception for the artist Thursday, June 19, from 6 to 8 pm
Yvon Lambert New York is pleased to announce its first exhibition of New York based artist Michael Brown (born 1982, Poughkeepsie, New York). The People!s Playground will be installed in the front gallery at 550 West 21st Street.
The title of the piece, The People!s Playground, is the name by which Coney Island, since it!s inception in the early 1800!s, has been known. Coney Island is the small peninsula that hangs from the southern most edge of Brooklyn. Its history has been intrinsically shaped by the immigrants and urban Americans who gathered there, creating their own forms of enjoyment and spectacle, developing into a tourist destination after the civil war.
In The People!s Playground, Michael Brown will present a large aluminum cast of a portion of the beach from Coney Island. Brown has been drawn to reproducing simple objects and gestures in minimal, distilled form throughout his artistic practice. His work is often engaged with political subjects represented by everyday objects.
The People!s Playground captures a community in flux. The utopian promise of Coney Island, a public space where many people of different means mix, is threatened. Brown!s minimal sculpture signals the encroaching displacement of the diverse, lively culture, a public space soon to be eradicated by private interests. The piece preserves a transient impression in time in its physiological entirety, the dint of fading footprints and debris in the sand. A simple, banal, repetitive moment is stripped of its cyclical function and value, frozen in the moment. Replicating the human passage through time, intrinsic to this preserved moment is our understanding that the possibility of future impressions does not exist. We will not have the option to partake in the rich history of the People!s Playground. In revealing a history that the on looker may never be a part of, Brown!s work unveils more generally the existence of socio-economic tensions between
public and private interest.
June 19- July 31, 2008
Summer hours from July 7 - August 31: Mon - Fri, 10am – 6pm
Reception for the artist Thursday, June 19, from 6 to 8 pm
Yvon Lambert New York is pleased to announce its first exhibition of New York based artist Michael Brown (born 1982, Poughkeepsie, New York). The People!s Playground will be installed in the front gallery at 550 West 21st Street.
The title of the piece, The People!s Playground, is the name by which Coney Island, since it!s inception in the early 1800!s, has been known. Coney Island is the small peninsula that hangs from the southern most edge of Brooklyn. Its history has been intrinsically shaped by the immigrants and urban Americans who gathered there, creating their own forms of enjoyment and spectacle, developing into a tourist destination after the civil war.
In The People!s Playground, Michael Brown will present a large aluminum cast of a portion of the beach from Coney Island. Brown has been drawn to reproducing simple objects and gestures in minimal, distilled form throughout his artistic practice. His work is often engaged with political subjects represented by everyday objects.
The People!s Playground captures a community in flux. The utopian promise of Coney Island, a public space where many people of different means mix, is threatened. Brown!s minimal sculpture signals the encroaching displacement of the diverse, lively culture, a public space soon to be eradicated by private interests. The piece preserves a transient impression in time in its physiological entirety, the dint of fading footprints and debris in the sand. A simple, banal, repetitive moment is stripped of its cyclical function and value, frozen in the moment. Replicating the human passage through time, intrinsic to this preserved moment is our understanding that the possibility of future impressions does not exist. We will not have the option to partake in the rich history of the People!s Playground. In revealing a history that the on looker may never be a part of, Brown!s work unveils more generally the existence of socio-economic tensions between
public and private interest.