Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming solo exhibition, Nan Brown: Trailers Collected. The show will run from June 7th through July 26th in the gallery’s Atrium space and present Brown's stunning typology of mobile homes. Her skillfully made, thiocarbamide-toned gelatin silver prints, in both 6 x 6 and 10 x 10 inch image size, are exceptionally beautiful, rendering many of these aluminum abodes with a radiant glow. Although some remain austere, many showcase their quirky individuality through various exterior customizations, interior design and surrounding environments. Despite the limitations of space and construction, Brown's tightly-cropped images share their inhabitants' efforts for unique personalization and expression of identity.
As a child, traveling across California, Nan Brown (American 1952 - 2013), was drawn, through her car window, to the otherness of the small, roadside communities and the dislocation of lone trailers. The artist comments, "From the side they are billboard-like and wonderfully two-dimensional. Their facades are of subtly beautiful tones and textures, a black and white photographer’s dream. The squares and rectangles of windows within the squares and rectangles of trailers, I trapped within the square camera format. The repetition of form causes people to look closely at each trailer for variation. Portrait-like, individual personalities are revealed, and later their fascination began to include the seeming license expressed in the treatment of the exteriors and yards".
In the 1970’s Nan studied photography at the San Francisco Art Institute. She taught herself Ansel Adams’ Zone System, and was especially influenced by his philosophy of craft. While largely self-instructed, she has studied with Mark Citret, John Sexton, and Peter Goin, as well as Ansel Adams. Her work is in the permanent collections of Museum Fine Arts, Houston and the Southwest Museum of Photography. Recently, a complete set of her series, Trailers Collected, was acquired by the Special Collections Department at Stanford University's Art and Architecture Library.