For nearly the entire month of July, Reuben Saunders Gallery in Wichita, Kansas, features the enigmatic work of painter Aaron Morgan Brown. Brown explains that the show title, Special Delivery,is a pun that alludes to his journey coming full circle—having been born and raised in Kansas but preferring the life of an itinerant. “I’m delivering myself to the city gates,” he says jokingly.
Annunciation 2, oil on panel, 20 x 23"
“When we look at Aaron’s work, it’s like we are seeing a scene unfold before our eyes. Yet, we are not sure what we are seeing,” says gallery co-owner Trish VanOsdel. “Our eyes process the image, but our minds are skeptical. Is it a dream? The image will replay in our minds, days later, and we’ll try to connect the dots only to be seduced by the elegant nuances that force us to start again from the beginning. Ultimately, the viewer will create their own narrative, and this develops into a wonderful dynamic between viewer and artist.”
The common thread in all of Brown’s work, “is the psycho-visual relationship between elements,” explains Brown, “between objects, figures and environments, the seen and unseen. I’m intoxicated by the mirror reflection of the waking world, rendered by hand in paint, in various ways, but the true subject is something beyond appearance. It runs through the work like an invisible network of telegraph lines, arranging elemental encounters that dovetail into each other, an endless chain of events. In other words, it’s more about composition.”
Dogfight, oil on panel, 16 x 20"
The artist adds that his established direction, or what he calls his “mother tongue”, is a form of magical realism—influenced by everything from theater to ukiyo-e, Vermeer to polychrome sculpture, to sycamore trees, the news cycle and the kitchen sink. Brown also shares that he will feature a series of work that is based in collage. “In these pieces, there is an emphasis on colliding shapes, patterns, bold colors, decorative schematics and spatial necromancy,” he says. “Some pieces fall between the two poles.”
Signs and Portents, oil on panel, 16 x 32"
Annunciation 2 is an impactful scene involving a child, a dog, a train and a duck, among many other elements. “I don’t consider myself a ‘storyteller’ per se, but I sometimes use pre-existing narratives as a vehicle for exploration,” Brown explains. “The biblical story of the Annunciation is one that touches me deeply. It speaks to the human capacity to carry a burden, the strange privilege of a suffering heart—a form of hard labor, which some are assigned at birth. The setting is a foggy morning in upstate Pennsylvania, where I lived for eight years. The archangel Gabriel appears as a duck, and the train track runs toward the east, where the sun rises.”
VanD, oil on canvas, 70 x 60"
In other pieces like VanD, we see what Brown calls a “remix” based on a portrait by artist Anthony van Dyck—one of the artist's historical favorites. “He made his name doing aristocratic society portraits, which were essentially transactional displays of beauty and wealth and power,” Brown says. “I transposed this to the digital age, with the exponential occupation of mental space, fuel injected by society’s obsession with technology (aided and abetted by fossil fuel) and exploding with hubris. It’s all told with humor, though—with a smirk, a wink and a nudge.”
Celebrate this brilliant, new body of work with Brown and Reuben Saunders Gallery from July 5 through July 27. —
Reuben Saunders Gallery 3215 E. Douglas Avenue • Wichita, KS 67218 • (316) 682-1481 • www.reubensaundersgallery.com
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