Spokane is full of great art and artists, some of whom are pushing the envelope and challenging our perceptions. With each venue offering a different angle on Spokane’s aesthetic, attending one (or many!) of the First Friday events is a great way to introduce yourself to the local art scene. When you come across something like Gabriel Brown’s work, you know you’ve discovered something brilliant. The immediate simplicity of his work belies the complexity of his message. At first his little houses made of cereal boxes and other consumer packaging are amusing. But on further investigation, these little boxes represent something much more sinister and disturbing. Arranged like the map of a suburban housing development with multiple culs-de-sac, these little boxes speak of the impact our insatiable consumer culture has on the natural landscape.
Brown was on-hand for the opening night of his show, Great Tasting Goodness! at The MAC and I had the pleasure of listening to him speak about his work. He described the cul-de-sac as being emblematic of urban sprawl and explained the process of creating a stencil and cutting it down layer by layer to create the great cul-de-sac made of corrugated cardboard and covered in more of those signature consumer packaging houses – a piece he spent roughly 300 hours making.
The piece on exhibit that haunted me most is a wall covered by photographs of various housing developments around the Spokane area. These photographs are printed on the white inside surfaces of even more of that ubiquitous consumer packaging. Brown noted the ephemeral nature this piece, explaining the difficulty in printing on this material, the acidity inherent in the packaging and how quickly that acid will eat away at and distort the images. The transitory nature of this piece echoes the impermanency of the subject: Mass-produced houses built for instant gratification and convenience, much the same as the products that were once housed in the brightly colored packaging that the photographs are printed on.
Great Tasting Goodness! will be on display at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture through August 29th. You should definitely go check it out!
We had 108 people vote in the design survey – over 1/3 of our entire membership. Here is a breakdown of the final results (letters coordinate with the key in the 