Communication

Opening reception Saturday, December 16 6-9pm

Bel Ami is pleased to feature Lex Brown’s Communication (2021). The 30-minute film will play at regular intervals in the gallery and can also be screened upon request. 

Presented in tandem with the group exhibition, Tell Me What You Want. 

In her film, Communication (2021), Lex Brown assumes multiple characters as parodic renderings of the telecommunications company Omnesia and New Greater Framingham, its next residential target for development. Aspen Van Der Baas (a gen-something girlboss), Jordie (her tech bro analyst), and Sylvie (an impassive and sentient AI), use their extensive technological powers to displace the consumer-citizens of New Greater Framingham. 

Finding their strategies insufficient, they enlist the help of B. Marbels, a fast-talking, ambivalent film director who is tasked with creating “plotholes” [gaps in historical memory] to displace the citizens of New Greater Framingham. To Omnesia’s chagrin, one such consumer-citizen, Marie, discovers the power of her inner voice to interfere with the algorithmic forces of Omnesia and its plotholes. 

These characters, the argots that they speak, and the scenarios they play out are reminiscent of the speculative fictions of the present, but Brown’s video also questions the way that speculation (as capital) and fiction (as a constructed narrative) work. Communication suggests the many ways that we are drawn, cajoled, and coerced into “the future,” at the expense of what (and who) exists here and now.

– Becket MWN

Lex Brown (b. 1989, Oakland) lives and works in Philadelphia. She has performed and exhibited work at the Kitchen, the New Museum, the High Line, the International Center of Photography, and Recess in New York; the M.I.T. List Center, REDCAT Theater and The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; The Baltimore Museum of Art; the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway; the Celebration Barn Theater in Paris, Maine; and the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Brown holds degrees from Yale University (MFA) and Princeton University (BA). She is the author of My Wet Hot Drone Summer, a sci-fi erotic novella that takes on surveillance and social justice, first edition published by Badlands Unlimited. Consciousness, a survey of Brown’s work spanning the past 8 years, was published by GenderFail. Brown teaches at Princeton University. She was a 2020-2022 Media Fellow at Harvard University and was a 2021 recipient of the USA Fellowship. Brown is also the host of the audio project 1-800-POWERS.