Colleen Brown

Listen to an interview with Margaret Ghallagher, North by Northwest, CBC
Read an excerpt from the book at The Miramichi Reader
Read an interview with Hollay Ghadery at the CNFC Blog
Read a review from Kirsten Fogg, Writer Out of Residence

“Colleen Brown has found a new way to approach memoir. Her method attends to sharp, intact memories that have inexplicably remained with her, while resisting the temptation to fabricate forgotten or unwitnessed events. The result is an account that enacts the loss she knows as a person rendered motherless at a young age. Her narrative accepts the fact that aspects of the family story will remain obscure while other parts are indelible. The beauty of this writing is that there is no exploitation of emotion here. The author takes possession of her shards of memory and polished them into poetry.”–Liz Magor

Available for pre-order now and for sale October 3, 2023 wherever books are sold— Colleen’s memior offers an absorbing, eye-opening, and heart-wrenching account of her mother’s life in fragments, conversations, and memories. It's being hailed as a must-read for everyone who has found themselves questioning the implications of true crime sensationalism on the lives of victims and families—and an especially crucial read for people who've never considered these implications at all. 

More about the book:
While in the middle of a divorce and in the process of reinventing herself, Doris Brown died suddenly in 1974. Two years later, a serial killer confessed to her murder. What propels this book is a desire to recover Doris' life, which has been obscured by the spectacle of her death. If you lie down in a field, she will find you there captures the cadence of family stories collected through interviews the author conducted with her siblings. Essays and memories by Doris Brown's youngest children, Colleen and Laura, appear alongside spoken word anecdotes that contain the family's oral history and tell us who she was.

Additional praise for If you lie down in a field, she will find you there:

“If You Lie Down is, to my mind, the finest debut since Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries: A Memoir and ranks with Annie Ernaux’s The Years as a life-changing event.” —Michael Turner

“There is a stunning urgency in this work. If you lie down, feels, at first, like a conversation with a friend, but lands with the brutality of human wholeness.” –Johnny D Trinh

April 1 – April 30, 2023, Ranger Station Gallery

Colleen Brown has created textiles, sculptures, paintings and works of intervention related to her upcoming book titled, If you lie down in a field, she will find you there, published by Radiant Press in the Fall of 2023.

The book captures the cadence of family stories collected through Colleen's interviews with her siblings. These stories pile up together the way they might around a dinner table. It is an inside look at how children born twenty years apart collectively remember their mother. It demonstrates how we construct stories about each other, focused on one of the most critical relationships in our lives, our relationship with our mothers.

In the exhibition, Colleen takes a very different approach to memory, focusing on the richness of texture and colour of some experiences seen in the rearview mirror of memory. Colleen combines the fabrics, objects and iconography of a child with those of an adult, as they are always mixed in places that house mothers and children.

That Moutain is a Very Good Listener, May 31-July 21, 2018, Burrard Foundation,

In That Mountain is a Good Listener, Colleen Brown extends illusionary landscape oil paintings into space, augmenting them with gestural wall drawings and sculptural materials. Primarily known as a sculptor, Brown has expressed her personal distrust of images and preference for sculpture – she interprets these physical materials as more “real”. In an attempt to reconcile this perspective with the medium of painting, Brown makes the pictorial more tangible in this new body of work, expanding the works into the space beyond the two-dimensional image. While the flat, illusory picture pulls the viewer into the image, the wall drawings and sculptures push back out into the gallery space, establishing a more phenomenological relationship between the work and the individual viewing it.

Her work Remember Maple Creek is supported by an appropriated poster of an idyllic autumnal river scene; extending from a moon-like, plaster form above, a black gloved hand walks the river bank. Here, the photographic image depicts a place that appears realistic, while Brown uses the three-dimensional structure to deflate this illusion, existing outside of the image in the gallery space as an object with mass.

Many of the works in That mountain is a good listener include cues used to navigate or measure our environment. Flags or weather monitoring equipment hold and mark the landscape. In each work, Brown is seeking a balance of gesture, image, object and symbol while keeping these elements separate from one another, in their own space.

Brown’s work brings to mind the writing of Michael Fried in ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967); the playful presence of Brown’s wall paintings positions the pictorial landscapes as having a “theatrical effect or quality- a kind of stage presence. It is a function not of the obtrusiveness…but of the spatial complicity that the work extorts from the beholder. Something is said to have presence when it demands that the beholder take it into account…and when the fulfillment of that demand consists simply in being aware of it and… acting accordingly.”

Whether painted or purchased, these landscape images can no longer be viewed as windows. Brown makes clear that each is hanging on the wall, a physical object with mass and weight, beckoning a bodily response from the viewer.

Brown grapples with the inherently pictorial nature of painting in this new exhibition, what Fried describes as the “absurd smallness of art” – the impossibility of truly representing an experience, no matter how unremarkable it may have been in person. By combining into her finished works disparate elements that exist in a state of balance or tension, Brown highlights their artificiality. As Brown puts it, That mountain is a good listenerexplores an effort to reconcile “the difference between moving through water in a sailboat, and looking at water in a picture.”

Hang up, bend and slump, low-pressure Ohio

1 October - 12 November 2017, Unit 17

For this exhibition, held at the gallery's downtown space, Brown has brought together shaped paintings and sculptural work produced over three years.

these works were shown under the title Rezoning in 2013, The Apartment

In Rezoning the works were repositioned each week by Colleen and visitor.

From the press release, “Municipal textures are created out of materials that need to be handled by an entire community and endure the inherent erosion. What makes these materials sharable often makes them unyielding to the touch, a hard response to a shared desire. Through their positioning (and subsequent rearrangement) the objects in Rezoning surrender to relationships, sympathetic narratives of support and collapse. The common frontal, albeit three-dimensional, relationship with sculpture and the immersive experience of installations are two common modes that speak to different aspects of an individual’s experience. In Rezoning, Brown initiates an additional relationship of being beside, near and with; drawing attention to our social relationships in the built landscape. In this way Rezoning is an active investigation of besideness. Just as cooking or performing other simple tasks can make a conversation flow, the act of arranging the sculptures will provide Brown and her dialogue partners with the impetus to stand beside each other and the work, realizing their active/passive position within this landscape of things.”

part of Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures, December 3, 2016- April 17, 2017, Vancouver Art Gallery

Since its inception in 1931, the Vancouver Art Gallery has regularly organized survey exhibitions of local art. Building on this robust history, which began with the BC Annuals (1932–68) and continued with significant curatorial projects of recent decades, the Gallery now introduces Vancouver Special, a survey exhibition that will occur every three years. The triennial model offers a sustained engagement with the contemporary artists who make Vancouver a dynamic art community. The title of this initiative, Vancouver Special, is borrowed from the housing archetype that was popular in Vancouver between the 1960s and 80s. Originally affordable and easily adaptable, this regional house style is experiencing renewed attention in the midst of the current housing crisis.

Ambivalent Pleasures is the first iteration of this series and it features works by 40 artists produced within the last five years—Vancouver’s post-Olympic period. The exhibition includes many emerging artists as well as those who are more established but whose ideas were prescient. Some are recent arrivals to Vancouver, while others are long-term residents who have already made significant contributions. Others are nomadic, less settled in one place and are working energetically between several locations.

The featured artworks do not adhere to a singular subject or style, but instead offer a set of overlapping conversations:

A number of artists engage with Surrealist strategies and ideas. They explore the unconscious and diverse modes of perception, speaking to notions of alienation, escape, romanticism and even the grotesque. In some instances, the works exude a comic tone; in others, a sense of the uncanny points to spirits of unrest that lurk beneath the surface.

Several artists present a range of approaches to abstraction. This naturally includes a number of painters, as well as sculptors and artists working with textiles who implicate the meaning of gesture or the history of modern painting without necessarily putting brush to canvas.

Other artists are invested in the possibilities of working conceptually to address today’s social contexts. Questioning dominant systems of knowledge, these artists make sense of the world through material processes, recurrent gestures and other types of interventions.

The title of the exhibition, Ambivalent Pleasures, refers to the complex nature of pleasure in the early 21st century as we become increasingly aware of the social, economic and environmental costs of our desires, habits and patterns of living. We can see artists in this exhibition preserving capacity for pleasure in a variety of ways. Pleasure is present in the processes of making and the sensory nature of materials. It is discovered in the wilds of the mind and in uninhibited exploration. It lies in political awakenings and socially responsive ways of working.

These artists live and work in an uncertain context of economic slowdowns, widening divisions of wealth, technological acceleration and global warming. Their disciplined expressions of pleasure may offer ways of perceiving the gaps between where we are as individuals or a society and where we would like to be. At a time when our experiences of pleasure are often too fleeting or superficial, encountering these artworks reminds us to be conscious of finding our own modest pleasures as we interpret and navigate the often contradictory conditions of contemporary life.

Artists:

DERYA AKAY | MAYA BEAUDRY | RAYMOND BOISJOLY | ELI BORNOWSKY | REBECCA BREWER | COLLEEN BROWN | MATT BROWNING | MARK DELONG | KIM DORLAND | BARRY DOUPÉ | MICHAEL DREBERT | JULIA FEYRER | JENEEN FREI NJOOTLI | TAMARA HENDERSON | COLLEEN HESLIN | JULIAN HOU | ALLISON HRABLUIK | GARETH JAMES | GARRY NEILL KENNEDY | TIZIANA LA MELIA | KHAN LEE | ARVO LEO | LYSE LEMIEUX | GLENN LEWIS | ANNE LOW | ELIZABETH MCINTOSH | JORDAN MILNER | ANTONI OKO | RYAN PETER | SYLVAIN SAILLY | RACHELLE SAWATSKY | WALTER SCOTT | KRISTA BELLE STEWART | ANGELA TENG | MINA TOTINO | RON TRAN | TRISTAN UNRAU | CHARLENE VICKERS | BRENT WADDEN | ALISON YIP