SOMETHING LIKE YESTERDAY
Aria Brownell + Sidney Westenskow
March 6 - April 2, 2021
ARIA BROWNELL
Short artist talk from Aria Brownell about Something Like Yesterday at Contracommon
ABout the Artist
Aria Brownell graduated with a BFA in Painting from SUNY Purchase College in New York in 2015. She is a figurative oil painter currently living and working in Austin, Texas with a studio at Contracommon Gallery in Bee Cave. She paints from photographs she has taken to emphasize her own female perspective. Everyday situations or moments in time act as windows that allow the viewer to see still-frames of Brownell’s life. Touching on small instances of contact, mischief, comfort, grief, and familiarity, she creates a myth behind a cast of painted characters. She has shown work in Texas, Connecticut, New York, and online for virtual gallery shows.
“My work explores the desire to remember my past. I’m consistently engaged in photographing and documenting my surroundings while looking back into previous lifetimes that formed my current self. As a tool for finding acceptance and clarity, digging through a montage of embarrassment, anxiety, depression, playfulness, and serenity, I paint still-frames from my point-of-view.
A constant voyeur and rarely a subject myself observed, skin and hair bring me close to my subject while averted gazes and glimpses from afar remind me of my separation and solitude. Photos are one medium I utilize and when translated into oil paintings they are rewritten and redefined. I constantly assess daily situations, reworking a memory in my mind until it's completely obliterated and turned into an entirely different memory. I do this same choreography with painting from a photograph. Darkness shows through once comical moments, and alienation and isolation are seen in otherwise candid flashes of automatic movement.”
SIDNEY WESTEKNSKOW
Short Artist Talk from Sidney Westenskow about Something Like Yesterday at Contracommon
ABout the Artist
Sidney Westenskow is a young, colorful, creative presence that changes her environment everywhere she goes. Her process often involves taking and manipulating the objects around her, and most recently those objects have consisted primarily of clothing. Her fascinations with portraiture and collage have merged whimsically in her latest body of work, consisting of large biomorphic fiber sculptures made with her clothes. Graduating with her BFA from Washington State University in 2020, Sidney Westenskow is now living and working in Mesa, Arizona and has shown work in galleries across the United States, such as the Dallas Metro Arts Contemporary, Plano, TX; Jones Gallery, Kansas City, MO; and Russell Exhibition Center, Detroit, MI.
“My work has developed around themes of portraiture, self portraiture, memory, identity, and documentation. In my practice I use clothes as a tool to represent identity. I collect clothing from my own closet to create large biomorphic plush sculptures. These objects suggest almost human forms. They mimic the way the body fills clothing through the lumps and creases created by tension between the plush filling and the seams in the fabric.
I find a lot of symbolism in the individual items of clothing used. The mass produced articles I use are familiar to anyone who grew up in the same 2000s middle class suburbia that I did. It’s the type of clothing you might find at the local big box store or at a glance through a window while browsing the mall. Within the sculptures, there exists two decades of fashion phases, iconic disasters, sweat stains, outgrown sizes, overworn seams, and identity crises. I encourage the viewer to pay close attention to the collage of memorabilia evident in each individual form. Consider that each item has its own reason for being included, its own collection of memories, its own unique history.”
Photo courtesy of the artist