Artist’s Statement:

 JEFF BROWN

Discarded bits of cultural ephemera, lost artifacts, corroded materials and time-worn weathered surfaces and patinas, evident of nature’s ravaging effects – These are the peculiarly romantic and exotic sources that inspire my work.

 Objects and materials, whose faces reflect a process of time and the natural elements, interact with my curiosity about their history. This world of the worn and eroded is reborn in my artwork to express an aesthetic that does not fit with our culture’s traditional value system for art.

 My travels to developing countries have given me an awareness of the indigenous folk art elements that are common to many of these cultures.  Shop signs, road signs, fragile huts held together with materials scrounged from refuse – all of these bring the strongest of influences to my art.

 Many of my pieces are nostalgic and reminiscent of once-significant objects, often from my own childhood; a Cracker Jack toy “surprise,” a discarded lead soldier or a fragment of foreign paper currency. The aesthetic criteria for a found object’s inclusion in my assemblage or collage is its venerable sense of time, wear and use with a feeling of origins from another time or far-away place. Formalistic aspects are also important such as shape, color, surface, and form.

 I’m after a sense of familiarity mixed with a feeling of rebirth and even a reaction of challenge or mystery with that which we would otherwise feel comfortable…that, and a purely aesthetic combination of materials, objects, and original artwork.

There can be a provocative and often confrontational quality to some of my work as I address social, political and religious icon and ideas. This is done, more often than not, with a tongue-in-cheek attitude if not in an outright satirical or ironic way.