#15 Collaboration Piece With Walter Brown
I’ll be examining the artwork titled “#15 collaboration piece with Walter Brown” by artists Bonny Leibowitz and Walter Brown. This piece was created in the fall, specifically on September 28, 2022 and was on display at the Art Gallery exhibit (room A-175) at Collin Campus this September 28-October 26, 2022 for Leibowitz’s show (Leibowitz, 2022).
Bonny Leibowitz is an artist from Philadelphia who serves as an active member in the Dallas art community (Brown, 2022). She’s particularly fond of applying different textiles and miscellaneous objects or mediums into her works, stating that she enjoys “the unexpected mix; old and new, handmade and manufactured” (Burns, 2021). Her bright, abstract way of creating sculptures combines well with Walter Brown’s artist style in this collaboration between the two. He is also known for vibrant use of color, but typically applies this to 2D works instead of 3D like Leibowitz.
The piece is made out of branches foam and plastic which is listed in the work’s description. It appears to be sticking to the wall, attached in some type of way where the securing object between the wall and the artwork is seemingly invisible. Reaching out with numerous mangled tendrils, the organic 3-D structure offers a variety of textures for viewers to get lost in. Different surfaces of the piece have been transformed in different ways, with certain areas appearing to look like coral, skin, or tangled hair. Most of the outer artwork consists of electric blue branches of different sizes, bending and twisting in different directions as they protrude into space. Parts of the blue branches appear to have a hairlike material that is present throughout the piece. This could be from stray glue, melting strings of paint or trimmings from the bark. The thinness of this element in comparison to the branches add a fine, detailed aspect to the sculpture. In the middle section of the sculpture, it looks like white, melted, deformed plastic has been placed and sculpted into the center of the branches. Tools of some kind were most likely used to manipulate the melting plastic into holes and swirls in between the branches. Underneath the white plastic is some sort of gray material that also appears to have melted, but is barely noticeable because of how muted the tone of gray is. Throughout most of the bottom of the piece, a hint of yellow paint is used in different objects which contrasts well against the blue and white that are prominent in the piece. The yellow paint is applied in a messy manner, with only partial coverage wherever it is used, unlike the complete paint job of the blue branches. Due to the lighting in the gallery and the artwork’s silhouette, the shadow on the wall appears to be a mass of different sized branches and crevices, letting pockets of light seep through. The overall mood and adjectives associated with the peace is intriguing but rather grotesque because of the jagged and brutal marks and ships created in the peace.
A constant method evident in both Walter Brown and Bonny Leibowitz’s work is their use of abstract forms and bright color. Leibowitz in particular, experiments frequently with the cohesion of different elements in her art which give off the overarching theme of different worlds colliding. The work is most likely intended to highlight the contrast mainly between two different subjects, because of the two most identifiable elements in the piece, in this case being the branches and the white plastic. This could be a message to viewers about the relationship between nature and man-made items, as well as the destruction human manufacturing has caused towards the environment. The rough, mangled quality of the piece signifies this damaged relationship between the two subjects or elements, but their proximity and state of intersecting suggests the two are negatively intertwined. In various different ways, this could represent relationships of all kinds. A viewer could interpret the meaning of this piece as the branches overwhelming the plastic, in the sense that one force of good is overcoming another force of evil.
Though the piece is rather uncomfortable to look at, the loss of comfort is replaced by a sense of intrigue. This makes the piece enjoyable to me and viewers like me, because not all art is meant to be aesthetically perfect and pleasing. The unusual approach of destruction present, the vibrant color of most of the piece, and the contrast between the natural and artificial materials used makes for a thought-invoking experience for viewers. Behind this artwork, the message could be telling viewers to pay more attention to the drastic changes occurring around us, especially in environments where nature is still preserved. Human behavior is contributing to the destruction of the planet in detrimental ways, and this piece effectively carries the essence of this idea through the chosen elements.
Sources
Brown, Walter. “Walter Brown.” Saatchi Art, 2022, https://www.saatchiart.com/walterbrown.
Burns, Emily. “Bonny Leibowitz.” Maake Magazine, 2021, https://www.maakemagazine.com/bonny-leibowitz.
Leibowitz, Bonny. “#15 Collaboration Piece with Walter Brown.” DigitalCommons@Collin, 2022, https://digitalcommons.collin.edu/seen2022/15/.
