Brittany Adeline King:
My wares, never mar my mind
My wares, never mar my mind (2025) is a group of eight silhouette figures, each one a hand sewn collage of acrylic on paper and inkjet prints.
Wares or trinkets or tchotchkes and the other things you hold on to because they have sentimental value often work together to make a more complete memory. They can pile up, forming a shrine. These things have a reciprocal relationship with the person who holds onto them even when an accumulation of things can feel heavy. The artist says otherwise: my wares, never mar my mind.
What about sentimental wares so big they cannot be contained? Like the strong desire to put a pink building, or beach, or sunset in your pocket, so you take a picture. The silhouette dolls here in the window are a troupe of beings who keep time, their surfaces collaged with images the artist took in Liberia in January of this year, or pulled from her archive of JET editorials from the nostalgic period of 1980s to early 2000s, bringing together textures of each place she’s from. In contrast, some limbs are just a page swathed in glossy black acrylic paint. The silhouette illusion depends on these abstracted limbs, which take you through the haze between the photographs and magazine pages and the unclear memories of holding each of these places at once. Look closely and some dolls contain the figures of other dolls inside them, a cannibalistic reprise referring back to itself, grounding everything again in the picture of the moment.
Artist Bio
Brittany Adeline King is an artist and curator living and working in New York City. She holds a BFA in Graphic Design from St. John’s University, New York, and an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College, New York. She has exhibited and curated extensively, including exhibitions at Company Gallery and Shoot the Lobster in New York; and has curated exhibitions with White Columns and Below Grand.
Curator Bio
Alyssa Mattocks is a curator and producer of artist projects and exhibitions living in New York City. She is currently an associate producer on SUN RA: Door of the Cosmos, a forthcoming documentary on the musician and philosopher. As the former Director of Deli Gallery, she organized exhibitions across the New York and Mexico City spaces. Originally from San Francisco, Alyssa moved to New York in 2019. Before Deli Gallery, she worked at 52 Walker and David Zwirner. She holds a BA in Art History from Oberlin College.
Dates
August 17 through September 28, 2025
Location
Long Gallery Harlem
2073 Adam Clayton Powell, Jr Blvd.
New York, NY 10027
Artist
Brittany Adeline King
Curator
Alyssa Mattocks
Organized by
Sundia Nwadiazor & Diallo Simon-Ponte