Richard Brown’s exhibit Named/Unnamed is on display at the 809 Gallery until September 16

The 809 Gallery is gaining a reputation for presenting diverse, quality work from local artists. Since its infancy in April 2007, the gallery has succeeded in spreading art appreciation to the residential community in Kensington. The 809 Gallery — located within a garage, surrounded by houses and dwellings — has the advantage of spreading the consciousness of contemporary art to a broader and unsuspecting audience. 809 aims to provide a supportive experience for the artists exhibited and encourages all mediums and methods of art-making.
    As another alternative space to commercial galleries and government-funded artist-run centres, 809’s approach to supporting art is flexible and almost bureaucracy-free. The gallery has revitalized the cultural milieu in Calgary, and its current show on Richard Brown marks a departure from exhibitions of emerging to mid-career Calgary artists.
    With art as elusive as Brown’s, the viewer is no longer subservient to the object but is granted instead a personal autonomy. The artist relies on the viewer’s own imagination to find resonance with the complex colours and sensations he presents. The work in the exhibition Named/Unnamed is enigmatic, odd and perplexing. Delicate drawings of clouds and explosions from which saturated color rays explode are both soothing and threatening. The piece can be seen as a cheery celebration of life, a mediation on some supernatural force, or simply as a pseudo-scientific study of sun-rays, mile-long columns of sparkling sunlit air highlighted by the darkness of adjacent, unlit voids.
    The works’ full significance emerges only in relation to the other work. When a number of objects are placed side-by-side, their significant value comes into focus and begins to take on a recognizable pattern. Each drawing evokes strange and contradictory anomalies. The image of the cloud/explosion carries an ambiguity about whether something is being created or destroyed. Brown muses, “As a cloud it is ephemeral and indistinct. Is a cloud really a ‘thing’? Is it more a phenomena? If it's an explosion, is it something coming into being or ending its existence? Ideas sometimes feel that way — explosive — but what are they really? Do new ones eliminate old ones? Does something simultaneously come into being and end? It's my hope that the kind of images I make can set these kinds of questions in motion, but I'm not in control of what might be the result. I'm looking for ways that I can investigate these things.”
    At once cheerful and ominous, Brown creates images that are binary in nature. These binaries (empty/full, colour/black-and-white, cheerful/bleak) are consciously wrought and placed by Brown. They are placed as clues for viewers to enter into the work, in order to become fully engaged conceptually and emotionally. He does this by demonstrating that his work can be seen in different ways depending on one's current point of view. Binaries, in Brown’s mind, coalesce to express incongruent feelings of loss, frustration and happiness.
    This dependence on duality to express dissimilar sensitivities is pushed further with his paintings. Painted thought bubbles, books, pillows and hammers hang in a sky clearly painted by the artist’s hand and anchored with canvas. Brown’s paintings seem to be internalized, with personal objects enclosed in clouds, whereas his drawings present an emphasis on external or negative space. This external/internal binary is structured to stress the interdependency of both media. The dreamy, self-reflective nature of his paintings is in sharp contrast to the mechanical nature of the pencil-crayoned cosmic rays of his drawings.
    The next 809 exhibition is Cross Current, a Glasgow/Calgary cultural exchange show featuring recent graduates of the Glasgow School of Arts, opening Saturday, September 22.