D’Amelio Terras, New York
October 7 – November 4, 2000
D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present the first one-person exhibition of work by Delia Brown. For her recent MFA graduate show at UCLA, Brown used red velvet ropes to cordon off a section of the gallery and transformed the space into a luxury hotel suite decorated with her own paintings. For the opening she hired actors and staged a performance – a decadent party attended by young, glamorous partygoers with the artist posing as host. Exciting, enticing, and exclusive, the event challenged the viewer to confront their parallel feelings of attraction and repulsion when faced with this seductive spectacle. The artist’s purpose in producing this fantasy scene was to create images that would serve as source material for a series of genre paintings and watercolors titled “Suite Life.”
Brown continues to use the tradition of genre painting to create images of contemporary culture. In her new series, What, Are You Jealous?, the performative elements of the project were staged away from the gallery space and beyond the voyeuristic gaze of the viewer. Brown’s exhibition at D’Amelio Terras will consist of over twenty paintings on paper and drawings realized from photographs of her opulent tableaux vivants. Her subjects once again inhabit lavish settings and are shown acting out a glamorous lifestyle that mirrors images prevalent in rap music videos, style magazines and Hollywood movies. Each piece is at once a critique, an accomplice, and an object of the lusts that drive our mediacentric age.
Delia Brown lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions in New York at D’Amelio Terras and Deitch Projects and in Los Angeles at Works on Paper and Margo Leavin Gallery.
