Lex Brown

Deli Gallery is pleased to present Defense Mechanisms, a solo exhibition of new works in drawing, print, sculpture, performance, fiction, and video by Lex Brown. Delivered through poetry, color, and science-fiction, the works in Brown’s expansive practice further her primary concerns—the characterization of commerce and control in contrast with inner transformation and freedom. Bright hues belie complex operations of language in late-capitalism, in which information is often abstract and indiscernible. Nature and technology intertwine in forms that evoke the “cartoon logic” of our built environment. In these works organic life, not computer learning, is the superior form of intelligence.

Throughout the exhibition, anachronistic technologies and art historical references are interwoven with Brown’s personal narrative, which she shares in a new essay for the exhibition. This essay will be available alongside performance scholar Evan Moritz’s essay on Communication, a comedic half-hour film written, edited, and starring Brown as 9 characters. This new work makes relationships between the breakdown of communication in personal relationships; to the way incendiary misinformation is leveraged by big tech; to the inner communication between self and higher self. Defense Mechanisms is Brown’s third exhibition with the gallery.

Lex Brown has performed and exhibited work at the New Museum, the High Line, the International Center of Photography, Recess, and The Kitchen (NYC); REDCAT Theater and The Hammer Museum (LA); The Baltimore Museum of Art; and at the Munch Museum (Oslo, NO). She holds degrees from Yale University (MFA) and Princeton University (AB). Consciousness, a survey of Brown's work spanning the past 8 years, is in the collections of the Whitney, MoMA, and Met Museums. It is available in a limited, hand-bound edition from GenderFail Press. Her first paperback work in fiction, My Wet Hot Drone Summer (Badlands Unlimited), a sci-fi erotic novella that takes on surveillance and social justice, is available by request. Brown teaches at Harvard University as a College Fellow in Theater Dance & Media and Art, Film & Visual Studies and has lectured widely.