CHARLES BROWNING - WEASEL POP

May 6 - June 6
Opening reception: Friday May 6, 7-9 pm

Jack the Pelican Presents
487 Driggs St. (between N 9th and N 10th)
Brooklyn, NY

DIRECTIONS can be found here



Jack The Pelican Presents press release:

Charles Browning offers a timely send up of the blithe, plain-lore idealism at the heart of contemporary American populism. Stock characters from period comedy - Daniel Boone, country boy and Scarlett O¹Hara types - inhabit his large-scale paintings. They are Saturday Evening Post men and women of destiny in a virgin land, untainted by the smell of anything urban, socialist, French, avant-garde or even slightly hip.

Apologists for the New American Right sidestep the Hollywood and Madison Avenue media to appeal directly to the grass roots biases and nostalgia of ordinary folks. With heritage-lore redux, they undercut and summarily dismiss the values of liberal democracy. In this context, vintage 60s Pop and its cool Post-pop spawn are coming to seem less relevant. Browning's "Weasel Pop" instead mimics these conservatives’ dopey, homespun-yarn style to meet them directly on their home turf. His high kitsch of American ambition is sentimental, sweet, really kinda dumb and right on the money.

Browning's mammoth, twelve-foot "Battle of the Indians" is wrought in the grand manner of Benjamin West (1738-1820). In it, Christopher Columbus heroically presides over the ensuing melee. So credibly pompous is Browning¹s execution, it takes a moment to realize that only one of the two tribes is native American - the other is from the Indian subcontinent.



Battle of the Indians - 2004
oil on canvas (84" X 144") (click to see a larger version)

In another of his canvases, "It Will Come to You, this Love of the Land" (from Gone with the Wind, a warning to Scarlett O’Hara from her father Gerald), a negro house slave stands at the base of a hillock, like Tiger Woods in the rough, as he dashes off a grand portrait of the jolly gent, his master, who sprawls out against a tree, contentedly devouring a roast chicken. The saccharine charm of the scene, the sweeping, cinematic vistas and the wholesome and sanitized palette point to an imagined time of harmony, before the Civil Rights Movement. Similarly, in "Greenest Tree in the Land of the Free" (misquoted from the Ballad of Davy Crockett, 1955), the coonskin-cap frontiersman suspended in triumphant mid-stride over a cliff - as he gazes in mystical delight foward to his destiny - reads all over him Disney Disney Disney, if not George Bush.


It Will Come to You, This Love of the Land - 2004
oil on canvas (72" X 84")


Greenest Tree in the Land of the Free - 2002
oil on canvas (72" X 60")

Allusions to seminal moments in popular American nativist consciousness recur throughout this body of work: the genre paintings of George Caleb Bingham and prints of Currier and Ives from before and after the Civil War; the history paintings of Benjamin West from the period leading up to the Monroe Doctrine; and the transcendant landscape paintings of the Hudson River School and Asher B. Durand from the age of Manifest Destiny - nothing, in short, ever embraced by the 20th-century cultural elite. Browning throws it all right back at 'em.

Contact information: 646-283-5316 / email (remove "BEEP" from address before sending)