TAYLOR DE CORDOBA
K I M B E R LY B R O O K S Technicolor Summer
TAYLOR DE CORDOBA
K I M B E R LY B R O O K S Technicolor Summer
KIMBERLY BROOKS Technicolor Summer Printed in California All Images Š Kimberly Brooks First Edition, September 13, 2013 Los Angeles, California All rights reserved. All images contained in this book are the sole property of Kimberly Brooks. No part of this publication may be duplicated or transmitted in any form without prior written consent from Taylor de Cordoba. Displaying such material without prior permission is a violation of the international copyright laws. Beil Essay expanded from original 2008 publication. Design: October octoberdesign.co.uk Kimberly Brooks kimberlybrooks.com Represented by Taylor De Cordoba taylordecordoba.com
TAYLOR DE CORDOBA
K I M B E R LY B R O O K S Technicolor Summer
ESSAY Kim Beil
The paintings in “Technicolor Summer,” Kimberly Brooks’ latest solo show at Taylor de Cordoba, are shot through with vibrant bolts of color. Jade, ultramarine and magenta course through the highlights and electrify the shadows in these paintings, adding an element of the supernatural to the otherwise familiar scenes inspired by family snapshots. Brooks explains that at the beginning of last summer one of her family members was diagnosed with a terminal illness. She recalls, “Immediately the world stopped. Every moment I was thinking, ‘This could be our last meal together or the last time we have this conversation.’ I started to feel like all the colors became much brighter; it was like living life in high definition. It was one of the more profound emotional experiences of my life.” The new paintings reflect the poignancy of this experience as they describe a feeling of muted nostalgia pricked by high-energy details. Though she works from photographs, Brooks is not a photorealist. As she relates, “I didn’t want these paintings to be about the people; I wanted them to be about the feeling that the people were having. So I distort things in the original photograph and that opens up the field of narrative for the viewer.” In the foreground of Yosemite River (2008), a boy plays in the shallows, while another figure wades waist-deep in the bottle-green water farther from shore. This idyllic summer scene is made strange, however, by the grove of fleshy, salmon colored trees on the river’s opposite bank. On closer inspection, the streaky wall of pink even partially overlaps the bridge, casting doubt on the painting’s apparent realism. Like dramatic irony in theatre, only contemporary spectators can see the pink trees; the actors in Brooks’ painting are unaware of the otherworldly presence in their midst. As viewers, we have to disentangle the
seeming realism of the scene itself from Brooks’ representation of it. Central to this project is the fact that Brooks’ paintings don’t pretend to be absolutely transparent windows on reality; instead, they reproduce the peculiar material qualities of old photographs. Yosemite River, therefore, unites two distinct temporalities: the imagined past of the photograph’s subject and the immediate present of our viewing it in Brooks’ painted reinterpretation. Literally, the pink forest is the result of the deterioration of the color snapshot’s chromogenic dyes. Figuratively, the color shift is suggestive of the way our own memories are themselves subject to change, if not total loss. Other paintings in the series also present the past in the midst of change, mixing faded colors with natural-seeming ones. In Awhanee (2008), an auburn-hair woman seated at a table set with white linen looks at a child perched on the window sill. Both the table and the child bear the characteristic cyan-magenta cast of a faded and shifted color photo. The child’s cool pallor is distinctly unsettling, though, because the woman appears to have been untouched by time. Gazing through the window at the child, the woman seems to be looking back in time, heightening our identification with her and a sense of trepidation about what the future may hold for this ghostly child. The precious ruins of Technicolor Summer are keen statements about the passage of time and the active part we play in imagining the past. More complicated than strictly photorealist renderings, Brooks’ painterly interventions in these images highlight the fact that even those aspects of the past that we cannot control, like the characteristic decay of color photographs, powerfully shape our memory of it. Kim Beil Art Ltd.
Yosemite River Oil on Linen 30” x 30”, 2008
Technicolor Summer Oil on Linen 36” x 44”, 2008
Yosemite Walk Oil on Linen 24” x 30”, 2008
Awhanee Oil on Linen 18” x 24”, 2008
Mulholland Drive Oil on Linen 20” x 20’’, 2008
Mulholland Oil on Linen 20” x 20’’, 2008
For access to the entire catalogue, please email art@kimberlybrooks.com.
KIMBERLY BROOKS Technicolor Summer Printed in California All Images Š Kimberly Brooks First Edition, September 13, 2013 Los Angeles, California All rights reserved. All images contained in this book are the sole property of Kimberly Brooks. No part of this publication may be duplicated or transmitted in any form without prior written consent from Taylor de Cordoba. Displaying such material without prior permission is a violation of the international copyright laws. Beil Essay expanded from original 2008 publication. Design: October octoberdesign.co.uk Kimberly Brooks kimberlybrooks.com Represented by Taylor De Cordoba taylordecordoba.com