Re-Imagining an Impossible Future, Marshall Brown Finds Beauty in Dystopia
Renée Reizman reviewed The Architecture of Collage: Marshall Brown at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art for Artillery Magazine.
One half of Chicago’s famous corn cob buildings, formally known as Marina City, floats above a winding road in a mountain pass. It pierces a white void, which highlights the building’s delicate edges, the bite marks in its ocular facade. Below, light streams through an open pit, illuminating a subterranean realm. There are thin, precise incisions along the collage, which are then mended with irregular strips of blue painter’s tape. The Round Tower (2021) is one of Marshall Brown’s many paper monsters in his solo exhibition “Marshall Brown: The Architecture of Collage” at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
Collage is inherently about creating unexpected amalgamations, and Brown uses the medium to build grotesque labyrinthine architectures and opaque, impassable cities. A licensed architect, urbanist and professor at Princeton University, Brown taps into his deep knowledge of architectural history. Primarily working with reference materials like old trade journals, magazine back issues and historical maps, Brown is an analog world builder crafting the future from jewels of the past.
The Round Tower references another work of the same name, created by Italian Renaissance artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi for his series “Carceri d’invenzione” (Imaginary Prisons) circa 1749–50. In Piranesi’s etching, staircases loop around a panoptic stone building, which Brown echoes in his own collage with Marina City. Piranesi combined archways, staircases, windows and cantilevers from his real-life surroundings to create these winding environments. Brown—long fascinated with Piranesi’s method of building the impossible with existing architecture—uses this work as a launching point for his own series, “Prisons of Invention.” Many of these works are included in this exhibition.