Brianna Rose Brooks: Come Back As A Flower
Brianna Rose Brooks, Perennial painting, 2024. Oil, airbrush, acrylic, and molding paste on canvas. 50 × 45 inches (127.00 × 114.30 cm). Courtesy the artist and Deli Gallery, New York.
Stepping into the gallery room with its four white walls and wooden floor, my attention immediately gravitates toward the delicate dance of words trailing behind a butterfly. This captivating scene unfolds as I enter Brianna Brooks’ exhibition, Come Back As A Flower, at Deli Gallery in New York City. The show serves as an emotional aperture, blending memories and sentiments of Black intimacy and vulnerability. Within this space, Brooks explores fiction, memory, and the beautiful messiness of existence.
Brooks’ paintings and collages create miniature worlds, weaving together images, relics, and silkscreen techniques. The collages, in particular, strike a balance between abstraction and personal attachment. Take, for instance, Sleepy time traveler where the collage resides within a metal frame. On the outside, a black dice keychain and a few pairs of keys dangle from the left handle. The central figure gazes straight ahead, perched against a blue-colored pencil background, a red silk-screened rose adorning their chest. The collage’s intricate details—outlined hair, aged paper—invite the viewer to linger, pondering the connection between the dice keychain, keys, and the artist.
Brianna Rose Brooks, Sleepy time traveler, 2024. Colored pencil and collage on paper. 16 3/4 × 11 1/2 inches (42.55 × 29.21 cm). Courtesy the artist and Deli Gallery, New York.
The other collages share a similar construction: a singular figure, layers of colored pencil, and aged paper, some marked by the passage of time. Each piece carries a sense of history, leaving us curious about the moments captured within. However, Lover of love deviates from this pattern—an introspective drawing of a figure submerged in lines. These smaller collages may serve as self-portraits, perhaps reflecting different moments in the artist’s life, yet their true nature remains elusive.
Moving beyond the collages, Brooks’ paintings unfold as fully realized worlds, blurring the boundaries between personal and fictional narratives. Vibrant and meticulously detailed, these works combine oil, airbrush, and other techniques. Personally, Brothers stands out as one of my favorites—a celebration of queer identity and connection with siblings. Cologne, razors, deodorant, and other items trail the wooden dresser as two siblings stand in its mirror. Both are wearing suits while the lighter of the siblings draws a mustache on the other. The painting serves as a memory from the artist, but even within this ‘memory,’ there are small fabrications that enhance its reality.
Detail of Brianna Rose Brooks, Perennial painting, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Deli Gallery, New York.
On the other hand, the painting Perennial painting is not a ‘memory’ but a moment crafted from pure fiction. The figure digs their hands into the dirt of flowers as the sun sets behind them. Wearing a gold ‘BRIANNA’ chain, they are tethered to what we believe to be the artist. Although this painting exists outside our reality, its resemblance to other works tied to the artist’s memory invites us to consider it as real–maybe even in an alternate world. Similarly, the use of silk screen in Appointment and the use of bedazzling in Everyone falling in love add distinctive touches.
Brooks’ style of drawing and painting aligns with the new wave of Black figurative painters that are pushing the fold in the contemporary art world. Rather than aiming for any form of strict, representational quality of Blackness, they embrace the expressionist effect of representation, influenced in part by Blackness in animation, media, and internet culture, added with autobiographical symbols infusing their works. Peers include Cheyenne Julien, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Janiva Ellis, and Alake Shilling. In Come Back As A Flower, Brooks navigates figurative painting with a departure from the humor found in their contemporary peers, delving, again, into the intricacies and intimacies of Black existence in today’s world.
Such intricacies remain for the viewer to introspect upon—an intentional choice by the artist in this exhibition. Without inundating us with interpersonal details or leaving us adrift in their works, Come Back As A Flower ultimately invites viewers to unpack our own memories and the realities, or even the imagined ones, we crave. Time leaves its mark on us all, shaping us through the ongoing moments we navigate in this world.
The artist’s written prose, which accompanies the black butterflies trailing throughout the gallery, encapsulates this feeling perfectly: “Time will not reveal everything immediately. It will stubbornly try to prove you wrong. Me and time? We’ve never quite seen eye to eye. Perhaps because we share more similarities than we realize.”
Brianna Rose Brooks: Come Back As A Flower is on view at Deli Gallery from June 13th to July 12, 2024.
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