An Art Lecture with Skip Brea '16
Artist Skip Brea '16
October 25, 2018
On Nov 8th, the Art and Art History Department is pleased to welcome Skip Brea to DePauw University to talk about his recent work and accolades since departing from the tiger nation.
In his imperfect, confident but questionable “paintings”, using digital techniques to print on canvas, Brea plays inventively with figuration, deconstructing, recreating and questioning the history of painting as a person of color. Brea traditionally began with an arsenal of mediums, mainly landing on collage as a thread throughout most of his works. Using the combination of digital illustration and painting tools, he examines the entanglements that make up our visual culture, language, and history. He pulls ready-made subjects from the historical cannon of paintings, mainly European, currently moving over to more contemporary, and weaves them together. At first, the spatial cohesion maintains the illusion of a unified image, yet it is intended to break apart under scrutiny. Many of the paintings draw from subject where the figures of color are experiencing an unfortunate event, or are positioned as the undermined figures in the paintings. Brea obtains these characters and subjects within the paintings and begin creating scenarios and portraits of the subjects as the main focus of the compositions. The figures are symbols of a culture and a time period; they provide a foil to the retelling of their fiction. More recently the portraits are now starting to begin conversing with one another providing retellings of literature or folklore.
“The premise of this body of work began when I began researching linguistics, semiotics, and perspective within the cubism movement, specifically the syntagmatic chains in old portrait paintings here at DePauw University. After taking a class with Professor Michael Mackenzie, I began focusing on specific subjects like geometric substrates that deal with how space is composed within paintings. It started an obsession with following theories. The one that stuck was the theory of syntagmatic chains throughout the history of paintings, mainly cubist collage. I than realized I could use these theories and the subjects and move them forward in time as pieces of visual information.” Brea has said. “The use of a contemporary medium allows me to create a narrative better formatted to our time. By manipulating and transplanting the original figure and space I reclaim and change the significance of what these subjects now mean. Removing them from their original compositions gives me the ability to retell their future. Rather than simply exposing their position, I deconstruct painting’s structures of power with digital tools, allowing the medium and the subject to exist in a new light.”
Brea (b. 1994 in Bronx, USA) lives and attends school in Tallahassee, FL. After getting his degree at DePauw University, he was the Efroymson Fifth Year Internship Fellow, which allowed him to teach under Professor John Berry. Working through DePauw, Skip Brea, earned a full tuition scholarship to receive his Masters of Fine Arts at Florida State University, where he is currently in his second year. At the moment, he teaches Digital Foundations at Florida State University, and has also instructed under The History of Art & Electronic Media. Lastly, he recently has received a grant from The Dean Collection, funded by Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz, where he was one of twenty global artists to receive the grant. The winners of the Dean Collection 20 St(art)ups grants included artists from Africa, Asia, North and South America, Europe, and Australia. His show will be in the Bronx, New York this upcoming winter.
Selected exhibitions include: A Friend with Friends, Gadsden Arts Center & Museum, Quincy, Florida (2018), Erwin Skip Brea.
Upcoming: Untitled, Bronx, New York (December 2018), Erwin Skip Brea. Grant Funded by The Dean Collection
Public Event - Lecture
7:00pm, Thursday, Nov 8th
Peeler Auditorium, DePauw University,
10 West Hanna Street, Greencastle, IN 46135
free and open to the public
This event is made possible through the Department of Art History Carol Bowers Norris Endowed Artists/Speakers Series Fund
Contact
Misti Scott
mscott@depauw.edu
765-658-4336