Lex Brown: Carnelian
Spanning video, sculpture, drawing, writing, performance, and the podcast 1-800-POWERS, Lex Brown’s incisive artworks confront pressing social conditions of our time—from gentrification and greenwashing to police violence—through an irreverent, sometimes jarring use of humor.
Brown debuts a multichannel video installation titled Carnelian (2023) and a group of significant new paintings. The centerpiece of this new body of work, Carnelian, looks with humor and pathos at impending global disaster and the varying psychological effects that an overwhelming amount of digital content, data, and even news media can yield. Taking the form of a musical—with songs co-composed by the artist and Samuel Beebe and script authored by Brown—the work offers a complex take on contemporary conditions marked by polarizing rhetoric and reporting, endless media content, and the looming threat of human extinction.
This interview with Lex Brown, was conducted in conjunction with “Lex Brown: Carnelian” installed at the List Visual Arts Center (April 4, 2023–July 16, 2023).