During a visit to The Metropolitan Museum of Art I went into the Egyptian and Roman/Greek galleries to look at the coins and reliefs. I noticed the way the coins and reliefs used symbols, composition, and material to communicate ideas and started to realize that these pieces were showing me a visual language that I could appropriate for my own visual vocabulary. – LaKela Brown
In her recent body of work, LaKela Brown uses hip-hop jewelry from the 1990s and other artifacts associated with African American culture as her source material. Preserved in cast plaster reliefs, these works appear as ancient artifacts, a series of texts and symbols preserved due to their importance to the culture that generated them. In Pattern Repeated in Reverse, door knocker earrings are translated into plaster and the universal appeal of these objects – bamboo hoops, heart shapes, and twisted coils – seem both ancient and entirely contemporary. Brown’s work has been shown in galleries throughout the US.
