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LEAH BROWN AND PETER SYMONS
"MAKING ART, CURATING, AND THE USE OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES"
Presented on: Tuesday, May 20th, 2014



In this presentation, you’ll be meeting two very special artists who are attracting a lot of attention in South Florida for their impressive and technologically innovative installations and for their curatorial vision, seen monthly during Art Walks at the Projects in F.A.T. Village, Fort Lauderdale. The Project space is more than 10,00 square feet of raw space, cinder-block and cement, with a huge wooden domed ceiling, allowing artists to create installations on a scale not seen anywhere else in this region. Come join Leah Brown and Peter Symons on Tuesday, May 20th for a unique presentation and the intimate discussion that follows.

Leah Brown and Peter Symons, artists and curators, working independently and together, are major forces behind the art epicenter that is F.A.T. Village. As head curators of The Projects Contemporary Art Space, they are instrumental in producing massive exhibitions seen during the F.A.T. Village Artwalks on the last Saturday of each month, and often collaborate on large-scale installations. In 2014 they received a Creative Investment Program Grant through the Broward Cultural Division for their exhibition Beep Bop Boop about our changing relationships with technology. They are currently finalists for a Knight Arts Challenge Grant to fund the continuation of the Projects including an expansion of gallery hours and programming.

They will be discussing their mutual development as artists, including their individual work, their collaborative work, and their curatorial practice. They have been working as artists along side each other the past 14 years, and have been each others artist assistants for most of the work created over that period of time. This has grown into a dialog about art practices, techniques and methodologies that has organically become a curatorial practice.

Leah is a sculptor and installation artist, whose object-oriented work questions the assumed hierarchical structures of reality through the creation of elaborate tableaux that both illustrate and induce reoccurring dream characters, perpetuating an ongoing narrative that assumes the active agency of the dreamt figures, themselves. Leah was born in Washington, DC, raised in the mountains of North Carolina, and currently lives and works with Peter in Fort Lauderdale, FL. She received her BFA with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design, and her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Miami. She is a recipient of the 2013 South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship.

Peter says of his art: “It is a mental process that imposes definition and distinction upon the visual field. When I look without thought, the visual world shifts, objects fade away, and the visual field reveals itself to be a unified field. In some ways, the act of perceiving is an act of creation. We create a map that overlays what is seen, one that defines objects, places, and all perceivable things. This map differentiates the unified field. We create the image. I am interested in this mental construction.” Peter was born in Ireland and immigrated to the United States at an early age. He received his Bachelors degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and his Masters Degree from the Pratt Institute.


LEAH BROWN'S WEB SITE

PETER SYMONS' WEB SITE