Current Exhibits | Past Shows | Derfner Judaica Museum

November 18, 2008 – January 25, 2009
 

The Hebrew Home at Riverdale is pleased to announce its latest exhibition, Eco - City: Paintings by Deborah Brown. Brown’s large-scale works in oil reveal the complex, uneasy balance between the natural and the man-made world, as the artist reflects on the tense, and sometimes humorous, intersection of these two incongruous elements in an urban setting.

Deborah Brown views herself as working in the tradition of such American landscape painters as Frederic Remington and Winslow Homer, though she redefines “landscape” in her own terms. In a series of pictures from 2007, wild animals and birds appear in unexpected places, often in juxtaposition to iconic New York City landmarks. A doe stands in front of the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, the site of the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair, staring out at the viewer as if startled by his or her presence. A pigeon walks along the platform of an elevated subway station, occupying only a small portion of the picture. A heron in silhouette flies past another relic of the World’s Fair, the New York State Pavilion, in a panorama that exaggerates the perspective of the architecture and its relationship to the landscape.

Brown’s paintings from the past year reflect her growing interest in the impact that technology has on the aesthetics of the urban environment. This is demonstrated, for example, in her focus on utility poles with their chaotic coils of wire stretching across the streets of Bushwick, Brooklyn where her studio is located. A richly-hued sky that is the backdrop to these scenes is interrupted only by dramatic, black tangles of telephone wire, street lights, and birds in flight. The contrast between nature and culture creates a disturbance that gives the viewer pause to consider the ramifications of what is seen.

A graduate of Indiana and Yale Universities, Brown has produced a great variety of public art installations in addition to her oil paintings. In 1994 she received a commission from New York City’s MTA Arts for Transit to create a mosaic mural for the Houston Street subway station in lower Manhattan, and has done similar projects for public transit networks elsewhere in this country. Her work has been widely exhibited in both solo and group shows throughout the United States, and is represented in prestigious private and public collections. She lives and works in New York City.