Carol K. Brown’s exhibition, “Down the Rabbit Hole,” at Nohra Haime Gallery features a series of heavily layered and “overworked” watercolor paintings, along with aluminum sculptures, originally cast two decades ago, but revitalized with new surface treatments. 

An inveterate NPR and television news junkie, Brown listens while she works. Today’s global crises distress her profoundly, and certainly impact the tone of her work.  The spiral forms in her paintings originated in a systematic doodling exercise she undertook about two years ago. Those drawings generated a formal language that evolved into this series of entangled watercolors, resembling root systems, neural networks, seaweeds, molecular chains. Their repeated curvilinear forms also led the artist to revive and rework a prior set of segmented aluminum sculptures. 

“Down the Rabbit Hole” establishes a visually compelling space that draws you in, but, as the artist says, “at the same time reflects the absolute insanity that’s happening in the world right now."

George Fishman is host of Qrartguide, a custom audio service that records and and delivers artist and curatorial statements to audiences via their smart phones, using QR codes. He also writes on the arts for the Miami Herald and ArtburstMiami.