Antonia Brown’s paintings engage with ideas of authorship and meaning in media. The work is graphic and vibrant, characterized by tensions between found images. In their proximity to each other disparate fragments suggest unexpected resonance. Though curiosity about photographic depiction is central to Brown’s work, she chooses paint for its malleability. The imagery rendered in her paintings does retain markers of the photographic: creases, tears, and the colour distortions of print process. But the symbolic charge of this imagery aims at the subconscious, where meaning is intuited rather than deciphered. Attention dictates the image–what is not noticed cannot be rendered.
Her paintings rely on the blurred lines between the perception and construction of reality. Brown uses unconventional cropping and composition to slow and alter the interpretation of representational imagery. When recognition is strained, even briefly, processes of perception are harder to ignore. Her work encourages attention to the internal movement between confusion and recognition, formlessness and categorization.
Antonia Brown (b. 2001) is based between Hamilton, ON, and Montréal, QC. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University. She has exhibited in group shows and has been featured in several publications, notably Yolk Literary Journal (Montréal). Her work is part of private collections in Canada and the United States.
