Kevin Brown Artist

Recent Work

The Masks of Knin is a recent body of work consisting of metal sculptures with moveable pieces.  Each sculpture is configurable into different identities, ages, attitudes, and totemic animals.  The importance of fun art, and fungible archetypes, is urgent at the moment: we constantly morph into various iterations of ourselves to cope with every event we encounter.  Shift-fatigue may make us weary and irritable: art is the antidote.  These sculptures remind us of our power to distort and un-distort our own faces.  Art, in this case, serves as an interpretive mirror.  The mostly quarter-inch steel is bandsaw-cut, a painstaking procedure unifying the artist with the material in a cocoon of sound and steel.  The artist truly becomes one with the piece as all else is edged out whilst cutting.  But then, the piece is NEVER finished.  The audience is equally the artist, arranging according to whimsy or high-minded seriousness.  Attributes of wabi-sabi, brutalism, and performance art are all at play.

Bio

Art is the fusion of fun and purpose, or at least it should be, according to Kevin Brown, a California native who cut his aesthetic teeth in the South of France, Tokyo and then Taiwan.  A published poet and graduate from an ephemeral but highly literary MFA at City University, Hong Kong, Kevin has devoted almost two decades to writing and criticism.  This training served him as he branched out into asemic calligraphy in Taiwan, architectural photography in Tokyo and Taipei, and finally counterbalanced those pursuits with metal work in Orange County.  Kevin considers life to be performance art: as a literature teacher, he encourages students to develop critical literacy and creative agency to bring meaning into any subsequent endeavor.  Kevin lives, writes, inks, sculpts and photographs happily from the heart of the Orange County art scene in downtown Santa Ana.