Michaela Pilar Brown brings her installment piece titled “Where They Cut Her I Bleed” to the Tapp’s Art Center, with an opening reception on Thursday, January 7.
This installment is a part of a three part body of work titled “Mother Wound.” Each installment explores Brown’s residential research project of generational trauma and violence against black women. “I take the exploration of violence and the empathy, or lack thereof, of the greater population and study the current movements in social justice, including black lives matter,” says Brown.
The exhibition will be presented in two dimensional, three dimensional and performance art. The piece will feature many materials like paper, fabric, cast plaster, sound objects and much more.
With a degree in sculpture and art history from Howard University, Brown is able to take her studies and her passion of narratives and fuse the past and present of “age, race, gender, sexuality and history. ... All of my work over the last ten years has had to do with issues of black women. I take frames of the vision of the black female body in the current culture,” says Brown.
Brown has always immersed herself in arts culture and objects, having “cut [her] teeth in the halls of the museum where [her] mother worked.” Her exhibitions have been shown in Washington D.C. and throughout the state of South Carolina. Brown has also done non-profit work and work in arts education. Now she resides in Columbia, South Carolina.
Brown is also an Artist in Residence at Tapp’s Art Center. “Tapp’s has provided me to work in an area outside my own house. It provides me a bit of isolation and to think without the pressure of producing a final object, and it gives me the opportunity to explore and experiment,” says Brown.
Following this exhibition opening, Brown will also perform Mother Wound live January 21 at McMaster Gallery. The live performance will feature sounds, video projection and body markings. It may also contain nudity and provocative subject matter.
Brown encourages her audience to consider their personal experiences in order to fully immerse themselves in the piece and to have conversations with one another.
The reception starts at 6 p.m. at Tapp’s Art Center. For more information about Brown or to see pictures of her previous work, visit her website michaelapilarbrown.blogspot.com.