WILLIAM ERIC BROWN: ATKA
July 22 - August 20, 2023
In the Little Gallery
Reception: Saturday, July 22, 3-5pm
Artist’s Talk with Steve Miller: Sunday, July 23, 3pm
William Eric Brown’s Atka series is based on a set of 35mm slides that his father shot in Antarctica during the 1960’s on board the U.S. Navy icebreaker, U.S.S. Atka. Brown enlarges, stitches together and reconstitutes these images with spray paint and diagrammatic charcoal marks to create a new narrative that emphasizes the isolation and remoteness of the landscape and in many respects its relevance to the current climate crisis.
WILLIAM ERIC BROWN: ATKA, July 22 - August 20, 2023
Reception: Saturday July 22 - 3-5pm, Artist’s Talk: Sunday July 23, 3pm
July 5, 2023, East Hampton, NY —- The Arts Center at Duck Creek is pleased to present ATKA, a series of photo-based works by William Eric Brown, on view in the Little Gallery from July 22 through August 20, 2023. The opening reception will be held on Saturday, July 22 from 5-7pm. An artist’s talk with Brown and artist Steve Miller will be held on Sunday, July 23 at 3pm.
William Eric Brown’s Atka series is based on a set of 35mm slides that his father shot in Antarctica during the 1960’s on board the U.S. Navy icebreaker, U.S.S. Atka. Brown enlarges, stitches together and reconstitutes these images with spray paint and diagrammatic charcoal marks to create a new narrative that emphasizes the isolation and remoteness of the landscape and in many respects its relevance to the current climate crisis.
Over a decade ago when he first received the digitized copies of his father Bill’s slides, Brown knew he needed to work with them and eventually began making an artist’s book (included in the exhibition) based on a selection from the bank of images. He decided to focus this body of work on a selection of shots featuring massive waterways carved out by the icebreaker U.S.S. Atka, often surrounded by ice shelves that are large floating extensions of glaciers. As he delved into the work and began the process of reprinting, repurposing and marking the larger-scale images, the subject of environmental impact revealed itself and became more than a subtext. In doing so, the original images now seem to appear as an indelible phantom in the ATKA series with thick ice sheets being maneuvered and crushed by U.S. Navy ships to clear a shipping channel, provide safe passage, reach a destination, and ultimately fortify territorial outposts. Half a century later, Brown’s son expands, mends, marks and redefines the images by hand to create a new glacial topography –– swathed with recolored ice shelves and drawn diagrammatic lines that suggests the vivisection of vulnerable icescapes turned into salvageable, everlasting natural domains.
There will be 12 works from the ATKA series on view in the Little Gallery plus the original artist’s book. The works were originally created in 2019-20 and all measure approximately 34 x 60 inches.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
William Eric Brown (born 1969, Argentina) lives and works in New York City. Brown has had solo exhibitions at galleries and nonprofit spaces including Meantime Co. (Brooklyn), The National Arts Club (New York), Harper’s Apartment (New York), Glenn Horowitz Booksellers (East Hampton), Calvin Klein (New York), Hallwalls (Buffalo,) and Goff + Rosenthal (New York). Select group exhibitions include the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts (Portland, ME), Brattleboro Museum (Brattleboro, VT), Ulterior Gallery (New York), TOTAH Gallery (New York), Luxembourg & Dayan (New York) and 601 Artspace (New York). He has also created several art books and has been published by Stolon Press (Sydney, Australia) and Regency Arts Press (New York). His work is held in public and private collections in the US and internationally. Brown received a BFA from the University of Southern Maine in Gorham in 1992 and attended the MFA program at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia from 1994-96.
A poem by AustraIian writer Erin Shiel, inspired by ATKA series (2019) by visual artist William Eric Brown
Berg
Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
There might be a peripheral memory
of his father sideways sliding into view
holding the back of a bike as he cycles off,
lifting him onto his shoulders, or spinning
him holding one hand, one foot. Around
the age he realises there’s a world bigger
than home and the corner park, he hears
of his father’s adventures on an icebreaker,
when he was away from home for work
or maybe in that submerged time when he
was not yet born.
Like an old photo patched together,
we are a composite, two halves of parents,
four quarters of grandparents. But parts
of the scene are missing at the joins:
the porch of the home in which we grew up;
the people kind and cruel along the way;
the path we walked to school;
the dragonflies of an austral spring;
how family spoke to us at dinner. Forming
another plane in spray paint and graphite
floating
in the foreground of us. Saturated
colour, not the blurry grey outline
of ancestry but our own self shaping,
vivifying the ice landscape we know
is there but not fully accessible.
The submerged berg of our character.
By staring out to sea, or the horizon,
by explorations of love and beauty,
work and duty the glacier of our history
calves at the hinge zone to form
our own ice floe.
Inspired by ATKA series (2019) by visual artist William Eric Brown