Linda Leslie Brown: Plastiglomerate

October 3-28, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, October 5, 2018, 5:00-8:00 pm
Second Saturday BADA Event: October 13, 2018, 2:00-4:00 pm, Art in the Age of the Anthropocene: a Boston Art Dealers Association panel discussion Moderated by Sam Toabe, Gallery Director at UMass Boston's University Hall Gallery.

As a sculptor Linda Leslie Brown's work metaphorically plays with the literal and the imagined as seemingly random, mostly discarded materials interact to build works rife with allusions to the body. At the same time, her sculptural assemblages suggest the plastic, provisional, and uncertain world of a new and transgenic nature where corporeal and mechanical entities recombine, serving as relics of possible futures and symbols of human behavior on the global environment. Her sculptures suggest a creaturely symbiosis as with holobionts: assemblages of different species that form ecological units. Each form is vulnerably porous with holes connecting and circulating energy through tubing of various colors and translucencies. The title of this exhibition, Plastiglomerate, is adopted from the name of a new substance created through heat fusion of plastic bits, sand, and other materials. It has been identified as a new form of rock said to be a geological marker of the Anthropocene era. In this era, humans are responsible for changing the earth and its beings in ways we can't entirely predict. Plastiglomerate summons an image of the overwhelming omnipresence of plastic, a human-made substance that cannot be truly thrown away as seen through the massive gyres of plastic in the Pacific, and the understanding that plastic does not disappear, but simply breaks down into tiny and tinier bits, which end up everywhere. Brown's work invites viewers to engage in an intimate examination that is both disturbing and delightful.