via: brionne
Notes (Excerpt):
Rising artist Akea Brionne is imagining an Afro-Surrealist world by the sea. In the 27-year-old artist’s mixed-media textile works, lone women, adorned with oversized sunglasses and cinched-waist dresses, stand with pharaonic poise against seascape backdrops while art historical elements such as African masks and De Chirico-esque architecture fill the spaces with uncanny strangeness.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship to the loss of knowledge and understanding oneself,” said Brionne during a recent video call. Her works—digitally printed jacquard tapestries that have been filled with doll stuffing and rags—are three-dimensional objects painstakingly adorned with beads. The works have a nearly votive effect. “A lot of this body of work is thinking about water as an elemental force that’s moved me to different places—I’ve moved from New Orleans to California to Maryland and Michigan, and Missouri in my life already. I think of these works as taking place in a dreamscape. Lately, I have been having these vivid dreams occurring by the ocean or where the desert and the ocean collide,” she explained.
Right now, a dozen of these work are on view in the solo exhibition “Trying to Remember” at Detroit’s Library Street Collective (through January 6), a show that contemplates how colonialism has shaped and changed the storytelling, memory, and assimilation of the African diaspora both in the United States and the Caribbean—but specifically through Brionne’s familial experiences.
The exhibition is an important inflection point for the rapidly rising art world talent. This November, Forbesmagazine named Brionne one of their ’30 Under 30′ in arts and culture. Her works have been exhibited by the Brooklyn Museum, the Mississippi Museum of Art, and the Baltimore Museum of Art in the past few years. This year, in Miami, Library Street Collective presented her works at Untitled Art Fair. In early 2024, Brionne will have her debut New York solo exhibition with Lyles & King as well as a presentation at Frieze LA 2024.
- Katie White (artnet)