CLAREMONT: Brenna Youngblood

Brenna Youngblood, The Benevolent and The Malevolent, 2014. Mixed media on canvas, 72 x 60 in. Image via pomona.edu.
Courtesy the artist and Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles

PROJECT SERIES 50: Brenna Youngblood

January 20 - May 17, 2015

POMONA COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART

330 North College Avenue

Claremont, CA

Brenna Youngblood creates evocative and moody abstract paintings and sculptures that subtly examine representation and the multiplicity of meaning. By combining materials such as canvas, found papers, panel, faux wood, and acrylic paint with fragmented photographs of solitary everyday objects, she creates layered, expressionist, heavily-worked surfaces with both an elegiac and abject quality in their delicately worn roughness. She frequently utilizes a singular image or object—chain link fencing, a solitary chair or light bulb, a star or pine tree air freshener—to symbolize the ordinariness of a lonely or overlooked humanity. Other times, the repetition of forms—fence, chairs, lights, trees—haunts in reverberations of earlier lives that approach abstracted memories of emotional reality. For the exhibition “Project Series 50,” the artist will present a new suite of paintings that explore gestural abstraction, color field painting, and collage, and that pose questions about memory, identity, and class.

Brenna Youngblood was born in Riverside, California, in 1979. She received her BFA from California State University, Long Beach, in 2002, and her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2006. She recently had a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and her work has been included in many major museum exhibitions, such as “Black in the Abstract, Part 2: Hard Edges/Soft Curves,” at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas, “Fore,” at the Studio Museum in New York (2012), and “Made in L.A.,” the Los Angeles Biennial at the UCLA Hammer Museum (2012). She is represented by Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles, Jack Tilton Gallery in New York, and Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Paris and Brussels.

Exhibit Link