timlandia

As of today, I am posting all new work/ info on my new website www.timothynbrown.com
Check out my new stuff over there—–

Images from the UCSB First Year review show, May 2011

Zine Library, Unit B Gallery, San Antonio, by Wendy Atwell for …mightbegood
National magazines and zines are as different as Twinkies and raw food bars: flipping through Vogue, it’s hard to find anything of substance within the glossy photos and airbrushed ads, while zines contain nothing but. Curated by Emily Morrison, the Zine Library at Unit B contains over fifty contemporary zines from New Orleans, Austin and Mexico City. Two hours provided only enough time to skim the surface of the flurry of zines exhibited. They are folded over white wire hangers, like pairs of pants, and hung at eye level throughout the gallery’s two rooms.

Zine material ranges from shocking and awkward to poetic and funny, but there’s nothing predictable, watered-down or politically correct within their varied pages of cartoons, essays, drawings, prints and photographs. Self-published, handmade and often community-based, zines come in a variety of sizes and formats, from photocopied paper double-sided and folded four ways, to the meticulously screen printed or origami folded.

Morrison is Executive Director at Trouser House, a non-profit contemporary art and urban farming initiative in New Orleans. In her curatorial statement, she mentions anarchists and pseudo-anarchists, how she had been living out of her car, punk rockers, lesbians and freeganism. The content within several of the zines reflects these fringes of mainstream American life; they’re not represented in InStyle, and only in W if appropriated by fashion. Mass media’s continued promotion of stereotypes stirred the Riot Grrrls, a generation of feminists who emerged in the 1990s and fought against these images. Like other ‘90s subcultures, they used zines to express their punk aesthetic and alternative female identities.

The title of Enola D’s zine of personal essays and observations, No Gods No Mattress, plays on No Gods No Masters, an anthology of anarchism by the French political and gay activist Daniel Guérin (1904-1988). In one essay, she describes getting out of her sleeping bag on a particularly cold morning and going to a coffee shop for a cup of hot water to put her teabag into. On her way she finds a cell phone in the streets of New Orleans, and is accused of stealing it when she tries to return it to the tourist who owns it. Their suspicion that she stole the phone in order to get a reward exposes an ugly side of class differences, between the people she calls yuppies and “entitled tourists” and her own vagabond life. Like many zine producers, Enola D’s resistance to mainstream modes of consumption extends to her the way her zines are distributed: they circulate only physically, not virtually.

Haley McMichael folds a long strip of screen-printed paper into beautiful three-by-five-inch books titled Observations and Daily Life. Funny and poignant observations accompany her illustrations, such as “Today I saw a vulture. Vultures don’t hurt anyone, but nobody likes them, maybe because they smell.”

There are multiple print issues of Pazmaker, a zine published by Perros Negros, “a production office of artistic projects” in Mexico City. Pazmaker #7, an audiozine, plays in the background. The forty-two tracks range from Joan Jonas reading The Anchor Stone (1988) to Marcel Broodthaers’ Interview with a Cat (1970).

This anthology of voices and sounds aurally illustrates the cacophony of voices speaking out in its printed counterparts. Because of their DIY ethics and self-distribution, zines are inherently political, though many possess particular sociopolitical agendas. The seductively illustrated a red rimmed star, published anonymously, tells a nightmarish and gory tale about a fated hunter who meets the hunting goddess.

“Word Without Meaning” is the title Tim Brown, UCSB artist, chose for his installation on view at “Riven Rock Refracted,” the gala benefit for smArt Families, a support group that raises funds for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s educational programs

MARILYN McMAHON, Santa Barbara News Press- February 9, 2011 5:25 AM
“Riven Rock Refracted” is the esoteric theme for a multifaceted gala that integrates fascinating characters in Santa Barbara’s history, Stanley and Katherine McCormick; “Riven Rock,” local author T.C. Boyle’s fictionalized chronicle about the McCormick family and their famed Riven Rock estate; and how young artists from the UCSB fine arts program interpret different aspects of the best-selling book, which was published in 1997.
In his novel, Mr. Boyle, a Montecito resident, writes about “the depressing story of Stanley R. McCormick, one of the sons and heirs of Cyrus McCormick, the inventor of the reaper, and turned it into a thrilling, romantic, careening tale of love, redemption and the rewards of the faithful heart. It’s no small feat when you consider that Stanley McCormick (who was married to Katherine McCormick, a Boston socialite and suffragist) was a paranoid schizophrenic and sexual maniac who spent the better part of his adult life locked away from women in a lonely, California-Moorish castle — the ‘Riven Rock’ of the book’s title — surrounded by a team of male doctors and attendants who were his only companions for 20-odd years,” according to www.salon.com/books.
The unique event begins at 6:30 p.m. Friday at McCormick House, 1600 Santa Barbara St. Now known as the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s Ridley-Tree Education Center at McCormick House, the setting couldn’t be more appropriate since Mrs. McCormick gave her former home to the museum with the express provision that it be used for art education.

Included are sculptures; a series of portraits; a piano and vocal performance; mixed media on paper; an installation in a fireplace; a digital video loop projected onto a mixed-media sculpture; and a presentation using steel buckets, water, paper, flora, string and an audio recording.

“For their works, the students had to choose a chapter, a paragraph, a character from Mr. Boyle’s book — whatever resonated with them. We also gave them historical information about the McCormick family from our archives, and they spent time at McCormick House,” said Ms. Hicks. “Frank and Sheila McGinity also invited them to their home, once the theater on the Riven Rock estate in Montecito.
“It was exciting for them to connect with this fascinating piece of Santa Barbara history,” she added.

Tim Brown, one of the artists, was inspired by the following paragraph from Mr. Boyle’s book: “That was how it was, and that was why he’d lived for the past nineteen years at Riven Rock, the eighty- seven-acre estate his father’s money had bought him, in his stone mansion with the bars on the windows and the bed bolted to the floor, within sight of the hammered blue shield of the Pacific and the adamantine well of the Channel Islands, in the original Paradise, the lonely Paradise, the place where no woman walked or breathed.”
Mr. Brown’s installation, titled “Word Without Meaning” in the library at McCormick House, will have books wrapped with multicolored dust jackets with the word “Sex” printed in 10 different languages.
On the threshold of the door to the library, a velvet rope creates a barrier between the viewer and the books, “the metaphor being a world of conjugal pleasure that was denied to the ailing Stanley by his separation from Katherine and all women,” according to Mr. Brown, who will also present a piano and vocal performance featuring popular songs from 1904 to 1947, the years Stanley and Katherine McCormick were married.
Other participating artists are Van C. Tran, Nick Loewen, Ruby Osorio, Emily Halbardier, Jared Flores, Daniela Campins, Nikki Leone, Bessie Kunath and Rimas Simaitis.

I finished a piece for Monster Show 5 being held this Saturday in Austin:

My effort for the “Welcome To The Thunderdome” MFA show at Gallery 479 on the UCSB campus.

I have helped curate a show of zine artists from the Austin area for a larger show being held in New Orleans from September to November:

“This week, a generous installation crew will begin working on the upcoming exhibition Zine Library (September 11 – November 30, 2010). The show will feature work by 50 zinesters from New Orleans, Louisiana; Austin, Texas; and Mexico City, Mexico. I have been working in conjunction with curators in Texas and Mexico to get this show going since last spring. The curatorial process has been really interesting and I can’t wait to begin building the exhibit.

Zine Library aims to connect the art of Zine-making with the impetus for the medium—the Do-it-Yourself movement, issues surrounding copyright and distribution of printed matter, and intersocial dynamics. A Zine-making workshop, directed at K-12 students, will occur in conjunction with the exhibit and will be held at the Alvar Branch of the New Orleans Public Library on September 18, 2010 .

Photos of our week at Vanderbilt University painting a mural are now up here on the Okay Mountain web site.