Louis Brawley

Aesthetics of DegrAdation

 
 
 
 

  1. Cloud Figure for Pablo, 2021

  2. White Collar, 2021

  3. Walk, 2020-21

  4. Elements, 2020

  5. Spectator Hood, 2021

August 2021 -  April 2022

Meantime Co. is pleased to present its second outdoor sculpture exhibition: Aesthetics of Degradation, featuring works by Louis Brawley. In this presentation, Brawley brings together a collage of forms which blend references to architecture, human bodies, and natural forms to create surreal sculptures, roughly hewn out of found fallen timber. The artist approaches this new body of work with a decades long practice inspired by sources as various as the Theatre of Cruelty and the Ashtavakra Gita with a vision longing for the directness of rituals celebrating life. 

The exhibition is sited in a lot between buildings on St. Nicholas Avenue in Bushwick, Brooklyn, visible from the sidewalk at all hours. Because of their exposure to the elements, these sculptures will weather, fully embracing a fundamentally unpredictable relationship with nature. The artist welcomes the aesthetic power of change as the sculpture adjusts to the chaotic beauty of the urban/human/natural landscape and the cycle of life and death. The attitude here is similar to Duchamp’s when he heard the Large Glass was shattered, he regarded the event as part of its creation rather than its destruction. 

This project also echoes the spirit of the Emeryville Mudflats, a sculpture garden that emerged from a local population of unnamed artists in the California Bay Area. The Mudflats were a movement emblematic of the creative atmosphere present from the 1960’s through the mid-90’s. Indeed, Emeryville Mudflats was the inspiration for Meantime Co’s first outdoor sculpture exhibition titled The Hippies. 

Like the Mudflats, the lot is freely visible to the public from the roadway with sculptures made from nature’s debris in an innovative, radical spirit. The sculptures of the Mudflats fell down routinely; were rebuilt, some lost, and others recycled by nature and other artists. Like them, the sculptures here may morph and blossom with the passage of time. Like their urban/human/natural setting, the artworks will participate in the cycles of creation and decay, continually emerging into unpredictable states.


Louis Brawley (1958) holds a BFA in Philosophy from Temple University and an MFA from Hunter College. He worked and showed in New York in the 1990s before meeting Indian philosopher UG Krishnamurti in 2002. Louis began traveling with UG and took care of him during the final five years of UG’s life. Brawley then wrote a book titled Goner about the experience, published in 2012 by Penguin India. After traveling the world for over a decade, the artist returned to Brooklyn in 2015 to resume a studio art practice. During the pandemic, he relocated to a friend’s farm in New Jersey, where he began creating the painted wood sculptures featured in this exhibition. A recent presentation of smaller scale works titled Aurora Funhouse took place at Sala Projects at 526 West 26th Street, Room 708, New York, NY from June 16 through July 23, 2021.