Amira Brown Adds Chaos

The style of the painting could be celebratory or frantic. Some of the exclamations painted onto the canvas — ​“dangit,” ​“crap,” ​“oh poop!” — could be seen as jokes. But there is something truly piteous about the posture of the figure in the middle. ​“I’m lost,” the words above her read, and suddenly we’re in the mind of a child who has lost her way, buffeted by the world. That disorienting, somewhat scary sense we all had as children has its echoes in the current state of the world, as the news doesn’t look good and we don’t know what’s coming next.

The work of Amira Brown (who alternates pronouns) can seem pulled from the headlines, a running commentary on current events — ​“which is ironic,” she said, because they made a conscious decision to halfway unplug from the news a while ago.

The conversation with Brown happened as part of Artspace’s City Wide Open Studios, which has gone mostly virtual this year thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic. In place of its usual in-person events, CWOS offers a comprehensive website of the hundreds of artists involved, along with information about how to conduct studio visits in person. So this reporter met Brown at their studio on Shelton Avenue, and got an up-to-the-minute take.

“If I keep watching this, I’m going to damage my mental health,” she recalled thinking a couple years ago about immersing herself in current events. In response, they limited themselves to following the news at its most essential, though they stayed informed. And even with limiting her dosage, they said, ​“you’re still not immune to the psychological effects, You can’t avoid it.”

“Even the president’s not immune,” she added.

Brown moved to New Haven when they were three years old. She went to Gateway and then Paier College of Art in Hamden, which they graduated in 2016. She has been a fixture of the New Haven arts scene for years and has taught workshops at Betsy Ross, ConnCAT, and Common Ground. They also work at Hull’s Art Supply on Chapel Street, which she described as ​“my dream job for years.”

“I like to work fast — just get the immediacy of the thought so I don’t forget,” Brown said of her art practice. The pieces they included in City Wide Open Studios were all created since August.

“The challenge that I’m setting for myself is that I’m sticking to two characters, two subjects, for a year, and just seeing where it goes,” Brown said. The two characters are named Lady Red and Dark Star, who she said emerged in a painting in August. In subsequent paintings, they said, ​“they’re changing, both as people and painting subjects.” Brown for a time entertained the idea that the paintings might have a narrative — almost like a graphic novel. But the paintings have turned out instead to be a ​“giant lesson on listening to myself,” she said. The narrative felt like an imposition, and stymied the work. When they let the idea go, the paintings emerged.

Dark Star, Brown said, ​“represents the potential of shadow, or void.” Dark Star has no face, defies categorization or definition, and in that sense, also defies having limits placed on her. She is ​“something that grows over time, from a child to an adult.”

In the paintings so far, the general motivating idea is that Dark Star is looking for Lady Red, who is ​“something akin to a mother figure for her,” Brown said. (For those who might want to read biographical information into this, they have confounding news: ​“My mom’s fine,” she said. ​“I know where she is.”) Dark Star’s search is a motivating idea. ​“Do I want them to reunite?” they said. It’s not as interesting a question to her as the investigation of how the characters develop, and how Dark Star conducts her search. ​“She’s trying different methods of looking,” Brown said. Because she’s a child, some of that method involves staying in one place — as children are sometimes told to do if they get lost — while the landscape changes around her. Meanwhile, ​“how does the mother change as she waits to be found?” Brown said.

Dark Star, for Brown, is also an investigation into Blackness — ​“the color of the sky at night, the potential of worlds, things that are not visible or known yet.” For Brown, ​“Dark Star is a powerful seed. I don’t know where she’s going, but she’s going somewhere.”

The idea of giving space to the concept to let it grow as you work on it extends to the making of the pieces, Brown starts with underpainting sketches on canvases that don’t always cover the entire frame.

“Then I just start painting, and this is where it gets really murky,” she said. ​“You just keep going, and keep painting — or I start ripping into the canvas.” As the painting takes shape, they might also add to the canvas, spilling beyond the confines of the frame, or making layers and adding three-dimensionality. ​“It gives me more room to choose how the image goes,” she said.

It’s part of a shift in the way Brown approaches her work. ​“It’s very much what I’m looking for in the process of giving and taking,” they said. ​“I’m trying to move into a more intuitive aspect of my work.” In previous periods of creativity, she said, there was more fleshing out of the concept and more planning, ​“and I would just do the work,” they said. More recently, she said, ​“I really like adding an element of chaos” into it.

Even as Brown mediates her intake of the news, she remains engaged with it. As an artist, they have taken part in several shows with specific political motivations, including a 2018 show at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art about guns and gun violence and a 2019 show at Creative Arts Workshop about sanctuary cities. Most recently, in June she created the Bailout Gallery to raise funds to help bail out protestors jailed in New York City, Connecticut, and Minnesota. One can see echoes of their approach to their creative work in how they talk about their engagement with social issues.

“I want to build sustainability for my city, for people of color, and for creatives in general,” Brown said. She has been reading bell hooks and others about ​“decolonizing my own imagination.”

“It’s not planned,” they said. ​“I’m just going where things take me.” It comes down to ​“what I can do to serve myself and the community,” she said. ​“It’s back to ​‘what are you going to do?’”

To schedule your own studio visit with an area artist, check with Artspace’s City Wide Open Studios website to see about artist availability.