morning Pages

PRESS RELEASE

Ruby/Dakota is delighted to announce Morning Pages, a solo exhibition of works on paper from the archive of Brianna Rose Brooks.

Thumbing through a seemingly never-ending pile of Brooks’ thoughts and emotionscapes, you might find an intimacy to their cartoon physics – playful, exaggerated forms that keep on regenerating, over and over, like a diary of childhood on repeat.

Adolescence is a serious thing, and there is something of that melodramatic nature lurking in the haunting closeups collaged with playful yet earnest text and bright, block coloring. Time warps, becomes wrapped unto itself as Brooks’ thoughts and vestiges of their intimate experience feel uncannily familiar, like they also may have come from you.

Brooks’ expansive collection invites us to explore the corners of a room, the privacy within a public space, through a solitary lens – suggesting aloneness, but not loneliness.

In between everything is light, a humor to the sincerity. Gentle, delicate, with a soft energy reserved for the liminal times of day when the light shifts to dusk, Brooks’ work lives on the brink of transition, in the moments between longing and detachment, reminding us that this too shall pass, and continue.

Brianna Rose Brooks (b. 1997) is an American artist whose work investigates themes of black representation, love and vulnerability as they continually shift through public and private memory and thought. Often manifested in the emotionally charged nonlinear space of a diary or journal, the work incorporates abstract narratives and microcosmic allegories of adolescence, intimacy, and self-reflection, as well as more formidable and antagonistic sentiments of anger, fear, longing, and dependence.

Brianna Rose Brooks received their BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and their MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art in New Haven in 2021. They currently live and work in New York, NY. In 2023, they were a resident artist at Skowhegan School of Painting Sculpture. Recent one and two-person exhibitions include, Come Back as a Flower at deli gallery, A Requiem For Benevolent Beasts, curated by Arianna Nourse, at Lindon & Co., London, UK (with Leyla Faye); Deli Gallery Presents: Brianna Rose Brooks at Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and Love You Coz You Always Tell the Truth, at Deli Gallery, New York, NY. With recent exhibitions at Collaborations, Copenhagen, DE, Gladstone Gallery, New York, NY, and Half Gallery, New York, NY.

Please join us at the gallery Thursday, MARCH 20 for an Opening Reception, 6-8PM