Underdonk

press release

Since 2017, Frances Brady has explored methods for combining painting and photography, Lee and Steppe’s primary mediums, respectively, through play and intuitive making. Their work follows the trajectory of Sufjan Stevens’ discography, each body of work drawing on the themes of individual albums to create prompts and parameters for their collaborations across media. If Stevens’ music provides the conceptual structure for Frances Brady’s project, queer joy, a shared affinity for proximate matter, and the reciprocal warmth of Lee and Steppe’s friendship energizes the work itself.

Much More Together is Frances Brady’s third exhibition and body of work. Like Sufjan Stevens’ much-debated Age of Adz album–a glitchy, electronic, and extremely personal departure from the dulcet, removed storytelling of Stevens’ state concept albums–this collaboration cuts a new path. Whereas Frances Brady had worked synchronously and mostly independently while traveling together in their home-states for Kind of About Michigan (2017) and Kind of About Tennessee (2018), Much More Together is a long-distance and dialogic collaboration created in their respective homes in Brooklyn and Chicago. After conversations about Age of Adz and the visual work by “Prophet” Royal Robertson that had inspired Stevens, they began with a group of resonant objects, some that they had in common (rune tiles, dominoes, the red and gridded border of a lantern slide from Steppe’s day job), hand-scanners, and the USPS. They each attuned to the things and non-human animals they live with or encounter daily, sending images they thought the other would like; they gave this matter living attention, both in their material processes of re-presentation and by looking for echoes of the other’s chosen items in their own surroundings.

What unfurled are eleven, two-dimensional objects that manifest a shimmery morphology of pattern, texture, form. Populated by runes, circles, florals, “Duplicate”s, nubby and streaky and translucent surfaces, these experiments in analog glitch (temporal and material) and digital montage aggregate a mysterious symbolic system. Although this system evokes the private space of affinity between two friends, it is generously open; finding themselves outside of themselves, this work invites viewers to relish doing the same, much more together.  —Francesca Balboni