Brianna Rose Brooks

Deli Gallery is pleased to announce Love You Coz You Always Tell The Truth, the first solo exhibition of interdisciplinary artist Brianna Rose Brooks. The show features a selection of recent drawings, mixed-media works on paper, and silk-screen prints, as well as one painting (Untitled, 2016). Arrayed across a long table at the center of the gallery are several sketchbooks dating from 2015 to the present that visitors are free to flip through.

Populated by diaristic musings and puckish caricatures lovingly depicted in candy-colored hues, Brooks’s sketchbooks portray tender scenes of black adolescence. On one page, a familial hair-braiding is taking place; on another the winking subject seemingly laments romantic misfortune, pondering "where’d your love go?"; yet another shows an individual reclining on a blue-checkered cloth, smoking a blunt alfresco.

These drawings furnish the source material from which larger-scaled works emerge. Untitled is one such example: On a kind of trompe l’oeil painting of a notebook page, gold cursive script ("i keep feeling the need to write my thoughts as they happen but they are moving too fast") is scrawled across irregular horizontal blue lines bisected by a vertical pink line. Two pictograph-like roses embellish the top-left and bottom-right corners of the composition. Roses appear throughout Brooks’s oeuvre, along with a host of other similarly precious motifs including stars, rainbows, basketballs, hearts, angel wings, halos, and water droplets (which sometimes connote tears). Loosely rendered in oil, acrylic, pencil crayon, charcoal, and ink, these animated images coalesce into palimpsests of text, symbol, and feeling—inviting the viewer to traverse the emotional landscapes inhabited by Brooks’s subjects, figures who are by turns melancholy, contemplative, exasperated, demure, and blithesome.

Brianna Rose Brooks (b. 1997, Providence, RI) is currently based in Chicago. Brooks has exhibited nationally including Oxbow School of Art (Saugatuck, MI), Free Range Gallery (Chicago, IL), The Southern Gallery (Charleston, SC), Dirt Palace (Providence, RI), and New Urban Arts (Providence, RI).