2024 · Winnipeg
The Fifth Element — Charlene Brown
aabijiijiwan New Media Lab, University of Winnipeg — May 14, 2024. Supported by SSHRC.
Curatorial Statement
Although seemingly static, Charlene Brown’s pieces always bear a conceptual dynamism within. These pieces demonstrate the long-lasting question of life energy as a fundamental theme of the artist’s oeuvre, whether it is manifested and scrutinized in organic aquatic forms or plant-like ones. This vital life energy is depicted as being born out of a constant confrontation and fusion of insides and outsides, smoothly glazed surfaces and rough parts, fluid geometries neighboring topographical anomalies of lost parts, altogether creating a terrain of struggle that is both dichotomous and constructive.
Artworks displayed in this exhibition present Brown’s overarching concern over working with and embodying the energy of life that is also historically shared in our collective unconscious. Whether named Chinese Qi, Indian Prana, Greek Pneuma, Latin Spiritus, or élan vital, this existing but intangible source of life and its objective incarnations have been a common question for humankind, where Charlene’s pieces are a continuum in that shared tradition of reflection.
The ceramic pieces of Charlene Brown are made from clay — earth — mixed with water, reacting with air and fire, consequently incorporating all the elements of the terrestrial sphere into the process of creation. But what makes them distinctive is the very artistic quest that ultimately adds the fifth element to her pieces: the vital force of life.