Coady Brown

Region: MFA Annual

Website: http://www.coadybrown.com

City / State: Inglewood, CA

Bodies occupy tightly framed, intimate spaces. Groups, couples, and solitary figures examine self-presentation in both intimate and public life. Figures are composites based on my own and others’ experiences. The figures possess a dreamlike quality; however, the world in which they reside feels more concrete and conflicted than a dream. It is a state of heightened reality, saturated by the surreal, frenetic, groovy, sexy, and sorrowful. The figures are never nude: they are decidedly, specifically dressed. The withholding of the familiar and often anticlimactic naked body produces an experience of aesthetic seduction. Patterns are painted in contrasting, high-chroma colors. Dots are stippled and stripes are squeegeed. Polymorphic blobs grind and groove over thick thighs.

This figurative world accurately speaks to bodily difference. Skin color exists on a continuum. Bodies are luminous, graphic, rendered, and flat, locked in a world that is both familiar and strange.