D’Amelio Terras, New York
November 16 – December 21, 2002
D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present Pastorale, the second New York solo exhibition by gallery artist Delia Brown. Each of Brown’s projects has explored a particular theme through genre painting. Pastorale explores the aspirations toward truth and spirituality embedded in notions of the pastoral. Brown will present a music video she directed and produced as well as a series of imaginary landscape paintings.
Finding inspiration in “Closer,” a song by west coast singer/songwriter Goapele, Brown conceived a project based on the music. Brown casts the singer as an omniscient presence, roaming through an afternoon party. The rustic location, the smooth tracking of the camera, the song’s soulful acoustics, and Goapele’s rich, warm voice set the tone for the pop idyll.
Also presented is a series of large oil paintings depicting imagined arcadian settings. Their titles refer us to Marie Antoinette’s Hameau de la Reine, the rustic playland constructed on the grounds of Versailles where she enacted fantasies of peasant life, and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond, site of “self-reliance” and the individual’s independence from established culture. In the paintings for Pastorale, Brown put aside her previous use of photographic sources and allowed the paintings to unfold without predetermined ideas about imagery and subject matter. With this project, Brown seeks to draw a parallel between the romantic ideals of painting and Western culture’s idealization of the landscape as the site of spiritual renewal and divine discovery.
Delia Brown has recently held solo exhibitions at Il Capricorno in Venice, Italy, and Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles, and has participated in group exhibitions in museums and galleries across Europe and the United States. Concurrent with the exhibition at D’Amelio Terras, her work will appear in Masquerade at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin and in ContemporaryArtProject at the Seattle Art Museum in Washington. She received an MFA in painting from UCLA in 2000
