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Iona Rozeal Brown
Iona Rozeal Brown divine selektah...big up,
2006
This selection of Iona Rozeal Brown's work presents male figures
appropriated from traditional Japanese woodblock prints and radically
transformed through an overlay of hip hop style. Brown's ongoing
project, collectively called "a3," or "afro-asiatic allegory," was born
of the artist's encounter with the ganguro phenomenon: Japanese
teens who since the 1990s have adopted extreme fake tans - hence the
moniker ganguro, which translates literally as "black face" -
along with cornrows, afros, and the high-bling sartorial markers of
American hip hop iconography.
Brown is concerned with the stylistic appropriation of African-American
cultural forms and with the global construction of identity through
consumerism. Formally, her distinctive work combines textures, forms and
colors in flat, patterned paintings with collage on paper in order to
suggest cultural overlay. Based on print sources from Japan's Edo period
(1600-1868), the work contemporizes the dramatic Ukiyo-e tradition -
popular genre pictures of the "floating world," a hedonistic,
after-hours milieu inhabited by geishas, Kabuki actors, and samurai - to
represent unexpected hybridities born of cultural sampling and material
excess.
The work is infused by the artist's ambivalence about the complications
of hip hop's global spread as it is shorn from its original social,
political and economic contexts in America and reduced to style. Her
encounter with Japan's ganguro was particularly challenging.
Brown
remembers: "I felt stung. They were imitating me - a black person - in a
way that was neither flattering nor historically sensitive." The body of
work that emerged from this experience, Brown says, "speaks to how we
assume new identities through clothes, hair, and makeup. To the
ganguro,
it's all just drag."
By invoking the extreme mediation of experience and meaning, Brown's
work provocatively calls into question the power of image, as well as
the appeal of surface over the substance of cultural forms. What are we
to make of the hip hop idols represented here, of these postured and
preening masculinities, in light of the samurai on whom they are
modeled? The connections are suggestive, far reaching, and wry.
Ultimately, Brown's work asks viewers to consider apprehension,
ownership, authenticity, and identity amidst the connectivity and
distortions of globalization.
Born in 1966, Iona Rozeal Brown earned a BFA from the San Francisco Art
Institute and an MFA from Yale University in 2002, and has had solo
exhibitions in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami, San Francisco, New York and
Washington, D.C. Her work was featured in Black Belt at the
Studio Museum in Harlem, in New Visions: Emerging Trends in African
American Art at the Smithsonian, and in a3 . . . black on both
sides at Spelman College in Atlanta. An African-American artist and
DJ who has lived in Tokyo and Yokohama, Brown currently lives and works
in Washington, D.C
UAMA thanks the private individuals whose generous loans made this
exhibition possible; Caren Golden, of Caren Golden Fine Art, in New
York; and Annie Gowlak, of G Fine Art, in Washington, D.C.
Iona Rozeal Brown is represented by G Fine Art,
Washington, DC
Also see the related exhibition, The Faithful Samurai
Visit our Exhibition History page for information
on past exhibitions at UAMA.
UAMA: (520) 621-7567
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