Solo Show, JANUS opens at CPM in Baltimore

I’m pleased to announce that I have an upcoming solo exhibition at CPM Gallery in the Bolton Hill neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland. The opening reception is June 17 from 6-8pm and the show will be on view through July 31, 2023.

In Roman mythology, Janus was the god of doors, gates, and transitions and is often depicted with two faces—one looking towards the past and one towards the future. The works in this show cull motifs from western art history while using artificial intelligence technology to blur the lines between painting, photography, tapestry, and low relief sculpture. 

In this exhibition, Brionne probes how AI technology can be used to mine, navigate, construct, and reconstruct identity using a visual repository of the past. The works explore what AI can do and expose what it cannot do, seeking in its “unhuman-ness” the possibility of a new, more human concept of identity.

Kitchen Table, 2023
jacquard, hot-fix crystals, poly-fil, mixed-media
60 x 48 inches

The long wall of the gallery will display a group of five 60 x 48 inch self-portraits. To create these portraits, Brionne takes photographs of herself and distorts them by supplying text prompts to an AI algorithm of her design, searching for the “right words” to describe herself as a person, an Afro-Creole woman, and an artist in the world. The AI’s mutations warp the figures and environments so greatly that each painting looks like a different person. Collectively, the self-portraits problematize the intelligibility of racial categories, the integrity of the body, and the boundary between figure and ground. Brionne has the resulting images digitally woven on jacquard tapestry, then she stretches them around canvas and adorns them with mixed media, yarn, and multi-colored crystals that shimmer as the viewer moves around the work.