Artist: Kevin Brisco Jr
Venue: Union Pacific, London, UK
Date: September 30 – November 18, 2023
Photography: Reinis Lismanis / all images courtesy of the artist and Union Pacific, London
Kevin Brisco Jr (b.1990, Memphis, TN) works across the media of painting, sculpture, installation, and performance. For his first exhibition with Union Pacific, Brisco Jr has considered the iconographic power of two notable plants present throughout Louisiana, namely sugarcane and four o’clock flowers. Both of these species were originally imported into the state and have direct links to the transatlantic slave trade. Through this reappraisal, Brisco Jr seeks to consider issues of place and representation, the plants’ image as an allegory for colonisation and the migration of bodies across the Atlantic, and how this history is still ever present in the presence of nature. A selection of paintings are imbued with textual fragments from notable writers, documenting the African American experience – further emphasising his densely layered and reflective practice.
Brisco Jr lives and works in New York City, USA.
