Ashlynn Browning: Building Blocks, March 11 – April 2, 2016

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                  March 3, 2016

if ART Gallery presents

ASHLYNN BROWNING

Building Blocks

March 11 – April 2, 2016

Artist’s Reception: Friday, March 11, 6:00 – 9:00 pm

Gallery Hours:

Weekdays, 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.; Saturdays, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.;

& by appointment

For more information, contact Wim Roefs at if ART:

(803) 238-2351 – wroefs@sc.rr.com

            For it’s March exhibition, if ART Gallery presents a solo exhibition with new paintings by Raleigh, N.C., artist Ashlynn Browning. The artist has been with the gallery since 2010, and Building Blocks is her fourth if ART solo show. The exhibition’s opening reception is Friday, March 11, 6 – 9 pm. The show will run through April 2.

            Browning’s geometric but expressive compositions, void of slickness, often involve a precarious combining of forms and shapes to create an off-balanced whole. While that hasn’t changed in the new work, other things have.  “My work merges geometric forms with an intuitive, ever changing process of applying paint,” Browning says. “Many of the forms in my work from 2009 – 2013 functioned as stand-ins for figures. These single figures represented implied narratives as they stood hesitant, crooked and brooding or upright and boldly assured. Each one showed a side of myself.”

“Since 2013, I've become interested more in creating a sense of place, rather than a singular form that is personified. I have been experimenting with stacking and aligning forms and exploring the relationships between them. There is still an element of the forms standing in for figures, but now they exist in groupings and in a more architectural context.”

“Experimenting with the idea of opposing forces continues to be an important part of my work. Bold color is set against muted colors, geometric forms mix with organic ones, and pattern and texture play off smooth color fields. These are variables that I mix and layer in multiple stages until a resonant image appears.”                                                                                                                  “The many layers in each piece speak both to the history of the painting’s creation as well as to the hidden parts of ourselves that we conceal and reveal in time. I know a painting is complete when it has become its own separate entity, one with a sense of dignity and self.”  

Browning (b. 1977) was included in the 2015 and 2009 Southern editions of New American Paintings. The Charlotte, N.C., native in 2002 was a recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant. She has been included in museum exhibitions at the City of Raleigh Museum, the Fayetteville Museum of Art, the Orange County Historical Museum in Hillsborough, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, all in North Carolina. Browning has had some 20 solo exhibitions since 2003, including at Art Space in Raleigh; Whitespace Gallery and Twin Kittens Gallery in Atlanta, Ga.; and if ART Gallery in Columbia, S.C. She’s been in some 50 group exhibitions since 2000, including at New York’s CUE Foundation and Lincoln Center; Proto Gallery in Hoboken, N.J.; Carroll Square Gallery in Washington, D.C.; Hallway Projects in San Francisco; The Helm Gallery in Tacoma, WA; Artspace in Galway, Ireland; THAT Gallery in Hong Kong; and Atkinson Art Gallery in Southport, U.K. Browning won first prize in the 2010 Carolina’s Got Art juried exhibition and has received grants and residency fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the United Arts Council and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She has BA in studio art from Meredith College in Raleigh and an MFA in painting and printmaking from the University of North Carolina Greensboro.