Melissa Brown

Magenta Plains is excited to present an installation of new paintings by Melissa Brown. The title Past Present Future points to a popular Tarot spread wherein the meaning of the card and the meaning of the position in the spread is used for fortune-telling.

Brown’s paintings and animations are often influenced by playing cards and other fantasy-related paper ephemera such as money and lottery tickets. During Nuit Blanche in 2009, she hosted ‘How To Win The Lottery’ in the Toronto financial district, a performance with the goal of winning the lottery with thousands of other people by playing identical sets of numbers.

In her installation at Magenta Plains, Brown will display large-scale, double sided paintings on corrugated aluminum in a configuration which discloses her personal Past and Future but hides her Present. On June 20, the spread will transform and reconfigure, aided by a performance conceived by Brown which involves a collective fortune-telling and divination reading for the public.

Brown’s interests in chance, collaboration, humor, printmaking and performance infuse every aspect of her studio practice. Brown currently organizes winner-take-all poker game with artists and collectors. The players use cards she designed called The Tabloid Deck, which assigns symbolic Supermarket Tabloid headlines. These poker tournaments have taken place at NADA New York 2015, Essex Flowers, New York, NY and Safe Gallery, Brooklyn, NY.

Melissa Brown will be included in Goulding the Lolly this summer at Gavin Brown’s enterprise. Brown has been the subject of solo exhibitions in New York City at Bellwether, CANADA, Kansas, Essex Flowers and, internationally, at Rove: Kenny Schachter in London and Roberto Paradise in San Juan. She has exhibited in group shows at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Musée International des Arts Modestes, France; Loyal Gallery, Stockhom, SE; Petrella’s Imports, New York, NY; Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, NY; and Andrew Edlin, New York, NY. As a member of the performance group Slow Jams Band (with Brian Belott and Michael Williams), she performed at the Museum of Modern Art and NADA Miami. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Hyperallergic, ARTNews, and Time Out New York, to name a few. She was awarded the Joan Mitchell Painter's Grant in 2012. Brown was born in New Jersey and lives and works in Brooklyn.