Kevin Brisco Jr: It's My House and I Lived Here

 albertz benda is pleased to announce Kevin Brisco Jr: It’s My House and I Lived Here, an exhibition exploring the security and intimacy that can be felt within a home while simultaneously invoking the alienation and unease one can feel when observing the concept of the house through the lens of our society’s least protected. On view in Los Angeles from October 4th – November 23rd, 2024, this exhibition considers the idea of precarity in the home through a series of paintings displayed in albertz benda Los Angeles’s domestic gallery setting.

The home epitomizes our most basic ideas of security and comfort. It is a container for life’s most intimate moments and a protective curtain for our most private shames. This protection comes hand in hand with precarity: the financial and physical needs of the home produce some of the most fundamental anxieties of adult life. In this series of paintings, Kevin Brisco Jr. evokes this dichotomy with sharp lighting that passes through rigid architectural space and falls with soft and subtle colors onto his figures and subjects.

A suite of smaller canvases depict quiet moments of intimacy, observance, and punishment as witnessed within the home. We are given snapshots of actions without full context, only assumed intent. Subjects are blurred as if to deny their factual existence, living only in a private memory. The larger paintings situate amorphous shadowed figures in the rigid angular architecture of the home. The repetitious lines of window-blinds and vinyl siding hide physical and psychological invasions into this presumed space of sanctity; be they barking dogs, baleful neighbors, or obtrusive security lights. The lines of safety stack on lines of intrusion and what was once a home takes on the architecture of a cage.

With these contrasts Brisco Jr. highlights the beauty and comfort offered in the domestic space while showcasing the menace and entanglement that lie just beneath the surface of every domestic environment. This exhibition juxtaposes the intimate and anxious overlap experienced in the home with the larger architectural setting of the home itself.