M Gallery, CICA Museum
June 21 – 25, 2023
2023.06.21-25
Electo-Sonic Painting
A native of New Orleans, Marcus Brown is a sculptor, painter, inventor, musician, and educator. Brown holds a M.Ed. from Portland State University and BFA from Kansas City Institute of Art (KCAI) in Missouri. His work is expansive and includes national and international exhibits and performances in New York City, Berlin, Germany, and Krakow, Poland, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, McKenna Art Gallery, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, to name a few. Brown
currently has public sculptures in Biloxi, Mississippi (Human Universal Musical Sound [HUMS], The New Leaf on St. Bernard Ave., and St. Peter Claver and Henriette Delille at St. Peter Claver School in New Orleans. He also has sound sculptures at JAMNOLA and recently developed a public piece for interactive display at the 2022 New Orleans French Quarter Festival.
Mentors like the late Lin Emery, John T. Scott, and Jim Leedy, instilled in Brown the importance of always learning and experimenting to create your own path. In that vein, Brown developed a form of painting called Electro-sonic Painting in which the artist paints with sound/data producing instruments. He has performed with his invention in several venues both locally and nationally. In addition to his performance art, Brown has exhibited with artists such as Andy
Warhol, Chris Burden, Hannah Wilke, and others around the world.
Brown is currently combining a new form of creative storytelling using Augmented Reality (AR) sculptures with interactive multimedia elements. His latest project, Slavery Trails, is a geotagged musically interactive augmented reality (AR) sculpture installation series based on slave ships and enslaved peoples.
Performance Esclavage (노예)
Taste Bar, June 25, 15:00
노예 Esclavage is a Electro-Sonic Painting (sound painting) performance that uses sound to explore the subject of chattel slavery in America during the 1830s period. I will use my technological iron collar and shackles in a sound painting performance. The Esclavage performance is connected to the solo exhibit titled Electro-Sonic Painting at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (CICA) in June 2023. The art making performance builds on the concepts from the piece Machine Noire.
In this performance I will recycle sounds recorded on the Amistad replica and Charles W Morgan ships in Connecticut for my piece Ship Drum. In the performance Ship Drum. I transformed these ships into musical instruments using specialized devices I created. This piece was designed to put myself in the place of an enslaved person and try to create sounds of rebellion or sounds of hopefulness. At the CICA museum I will create an Electro-Sonic Painting (sound painting) performance and I will present my exhibition.
