On the cover and throughout the issue, we’re pleased to present selections from Kevin Brisco Jr.’s series It’s My House and I Lived Here, which premiered at albertz benda gallery in Los Angeles, October 4–November 23, 2024.
THE HOME EPITOMIZES our most basic ideas of security and comfort. It is a container for life’s most intimate moments and a protective curtain for our most private shames. This protection comes hand in hand with precarity: the financial and physical needs of the home produce some of the most fundamental anxieties of adult life. In this series of paintings, Kevin Brisco Jr. evokes this dichotomy with sharp lighting that passes through rigid architectural space and falls with soft and subtle colors onto his figures and subjects.
A suite of smaller canvases depicts quiet moments of intimacy, observance, and punishment as witnessed within the home. We are given snapshots of actions without full context, only assumed intent. Subjects are blurred as if to deny their factual existence, living only in a private memory. The larger paintings situate amorphous shadowed figures in the rigid angular architecture of the home. The repetitious lines of window blinds and vinyl siding hide physical and psychological invasions into this presumed space of sanctity, be they barking dogs, baleful neighbors, or obtrusive security lights. The lines of safety stack on lines of intrusion, and what was once a home takes on the architecture of a cage.
With these contrasts, Brisco highlights the beauty and comfort offered in the domestic space, while showcasing the menace and entanglement that lie just beneath the surface of every domestic environment. This exhibition juxtaposes the intimate and anxious overlap experienced in the home with the larger architectural setting of the home itself.
Kevin Brisco Jr. (b. 1990, Memphis, Tennessee) earned his BA from Wesleyan University in 2013 and his MFA from Yale University in 2020. He has exhibited at albertz benda, New York; Union Pacific, London; tone, Memphis; the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans; Perrotin, New York; Rumpelstiltskin Gallery, Brooklyn; Sevil Dolmaci Gallery, Istanbul; and Antenna Gallery, New Orleans, among others. He is the recipient of numerous grants and was awarded artist-in-residence fellowships at the Fine Art Works Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts; The Macedonia Institute in Chatham, New York; and the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont. Brisco lives and works in Austin, Texas.
