Crystal Brown
Invisible Picnic, installation.
As an interdisciplinary artist/mother/academic/curator, my studio practice is informed by my multifaceted identity. The blending of my studio practice with the other aspects of my life also touches on its inherent challenges. For example, my love/hate relationship with my kitchen might manifest in my drawings and paintings that celebrate work and the labor of love with a hint of fury and frustration shown in the economy of line found in blind contour drawings. My practice strives to reveal the underappreciated aspects of mothering and everyday life using textiles, sculpture, time-based media, social practice, and drawing. The work I make reveals the underappreciated aspects of unseen labor derived from caregiving. After all, care work makes all other work possible and yet we live in a culture that undervalues domestic labor and even refuses to see it. Making the invisible visible to raise cultural awareness about what we see as valuable and what we do not can be found in works such as Momument, a floor-to-ceiling sculpture assembled with stacks of overfilled laundry baskets one stacked on top of the other, holding my family’s clothes and other objects used to care for my kids as they were growing like cloth diapers, soft baby slings/carries, and baby blankets. The items in the monument represent a labor of love. The play on the words ‘mom’ and ‘monument’ highlights that most of the care work is still placed on women (mom) and monuments have historically been erected to commemorate cultural events or culturally significant people and/or places. Momument makes domestic labor visible and simultaneously raises its value.
