Garden Variety

Garden-variety: of the usual or ordinary type; commonplace.

The past few years have seen a global pandemic and significant, and on-going, political and environmental turmoil; these paintings reflect a longing for the ordinary with an understanding that ordinary may never have existed in the first place.

Brownell’s work focuses on the seemingly ordinary subject of food, as depicted in traditional still-life painting, but in her hands reveals an examination of cultural values, both shifting and static. Primary questions about food, from how it is grown, processed, marketed, and consumed to how it functions as a signifier in society, are alluded to in her complex and intertwining images. If we are what we eat, the artist asks, then we can look to our food, how it is processed, manipulated, and prepared for consumption, for revelations about ourselves and what we may become. Like the microbiology embedded in our food, Brownell sees a parallel to social constructs that create, or attempt to define, who we are.