571 Projects presents the trees are my elephants: longing and the insufficiency of language, work by artist Lindsey Brown. Continuing 571 Projects’ mission to present mid-career and emerging artists, this fascinatingly intricate and intimate solo exhibition of mixed media works on canvas and paper explores the secret language of dreams and everyday life. Brown’s work provides a staging ground for collaged natural and synthetic materials such as pressed flowers, poured paint and gold leaf, messenger birds and shamanic rabbits.

Throughout her work Brown allows inchoate feelings, symbols and images to compensate for the insufficiency of common language, while she explores the space between what is real and what is not real.

Working out of a 200-year-old renovated Dutch barn in upstate New York, Brown intuitively chooses from materials such as sand, shells, spider webs, berries, branches, and bracket fungus, applying natural objects directly to the surface. She integrates these diverse elements within the context of the whole. Her pieces evolve over a long period of time and like ancient manuscripts they develop the burnished tones of Japanese scroll paintings and Indian miniatures.

In All of the Losses II, a large canvas derived from a series of map paintings, Brown plumbs psychological territories – dream places in imaginary spaces drawn from ritual and diaries, just on the threshold where things come into being. She takes us above the clouds for a bird’s eye view similar to that which might be experienced in dreams of flying. As in early Renaissance paintings the bird functions as a spiritual interlocutor, who points the direction in which to look – into the artist’s inner life.

Brown’s work has been exhibited across the United States, at The Parish Art Museum, the Danforth Art Museum, Rose Burlingham Gallery (New York City), Work Sound Gallery (Portland, Oregon), Ruth Bachofner Gallery (Santa Monica, California) and Susan Shomberg Gallery (Santa Monica, California). Brown has received fellowships at Yaddo, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. This is her first solo show at 571 Projects.