CRYSTAL ANN BROWN
Invisible Picnic, Crystal Ann Brown, Collaborative performance, 2022
Invisible Picnic is a collaborative performance with my family that involves us having a picnic in costumes that blend into each other and into our picnic blanket. The work conjures ideas of visibility and invisibility around domestic labor and care work.
The total time of the performance varies(15mins-90mins) and is dependent on the willingness of my family members. Do they want to sit and eat and chat or want to eat and leave or maybe my youngest doesn't want to eat at all?
I'd like to record the performance and replay the video as well as leave the picnic materials that remain after the performance out as a document of the activities and as a sculptural work.
36 explores shifting identities caused by mothering and aging. The project was created a few weeks before my 36th birthday in 2020 and consists of 36 self-portraits drawn by using the blind contour technique. My kids were invited to color and paint on top of the portraits along with me. As I have aged, I have changed many times and, in many ways, but nothing like the change I experienced as a mother. My whole identity has been altered by my relationship with my children. The way I see myself has changed. The way others see me and especially how my kids see me as I age along with them.
"Monument, " multimedia 3D sculpture, Crystal Ann Brown, 2019
Crystal Ann Brown is an interdisciplinary artist/mother/academic currently working in Buckhannon, West Virginia. For the past 9 years, her work has focused on holistically blending art and life. This blending of her studio practice with her daily life also touches on its inherent challenges. In her words, “my love/hate relationship with my kitchen might manifest in my drawings and paintings that celebrate work and the labor of love with a hint of fury and frustration shown in the economy of line found in blind contour drawings.” Her practice strives to reveal the underappreciated aspects of mothering and everyday life through the use of textiles, sculpture, time-based media, social practice and drawing.
In 2012 Crystal Ann Brown earned her MFA in sculpture and expanded practice from Ohio University School of Art. Crystal is the founder and director of The Howns Den: A Nomadic + Domestic Exhibition Space that works to bring new ways of viewing contemporary art to her community. She has shown nationally and internationally and was included in Chasing Horizons, an exhibition at the Charles Allis Museum of Decorative Arts in Milwaukee, WI in 2014. More recently her work has been shown as part of the 2019 West Virginia Invitational at the Juliet Museum of Art in Charleston, West Virginia, and her work has been included in the Exhibitions Why Mom, Maddison, WI and re:birth in Edinburgh, UK. Crystal is currently an adjunct professor at West Virginia Wesleyan College and director of the Sleeth Gallery.