Art Criticism and Reporting by Devon Britt-Darby, 2013
Art League Houston is excited to present Art Criticism and Reporting, a two part exhibition by Devon Britt-Darby that combines fragments of retrieved memories to explore themes of vulnerability, portraiture and “appropriated autobiography.” Using a performative painting process, the exhibit will piece together scenes from the artist’s past as a sex worker and a former newspaper art critic to evoke ambiguous narratives that it is ultimately up to the viewer to complete.
The first part of the exhibition features a series of text paintings conceived as portraits of the authors whose words are contained therein. Painted against abstract, reflective backgrounds that cause the words to shift in and out of legibility with changes in the light and the viewer’s orientation, the texts are appropriated from Internet forum posts and press articles written about Britt-Darby during and two cross-country road trips – one in 2004, another in 2011-2012 – that provoked alarm and public speculation about his mental state.
The second installment of the exhibition features a three week residency in the ALH Front Gallery where the artist will complete a mural size painting on upstretched canvas. ALH visitors are welcome to enter the gallery and talk with the artist as he works.
“Although I am best known as a former Houston Chronicle art writer, the Art Criticism and Reporting of the title is not by me, but rather directed at me” Britt-Darby says. “The painted passages were written during and after two journeys I made under the influence of a nervous breakdown -- the former chemically induced, the latter emotionally. These breakdowns bracketed my newspaper journalism career as an art critic and reporter, both paving the way for it and ending it, respectively. On the other hand, the first breakdown brought my development as a visual artist and my career as a sex worker to a screeching halt, while the second one revived both”.
The mural-size painting will use text from a police report documenting a 2004 arrest that led to a stint in a forensic psychiatric hospital. “The idea behind the residency is total vulnerability,” Britt-Darby says. “The critic, whose process is normally invisible to his readers, who only see the edited product – exposes his entire process while unfolding a tale of his lowest moment that isn't even in his own words.”
