Library Street Collective is excited to announce our participation in the 2024 Armory Show at Booth 425, presenting new work by Detroit artists Akea Brionne and Paul Verdell. Through processes in textile (Brionne) and paint (Verdell), the artists share a reflection on nature and the unconscious, as well as an examination of memories within the body that embed, persist, and shift over time.

Brionne’s textile works–titled Swamp Stories–center upon a fictional landscape inspired by the swamps of Louisiana, where the artist was born. Waters rise around her posed black female figures, and the scenes invoke mythic and folkloric elements that speak to stories and histories of her birthplace. “The pieces allude to the passage of time, also present in references to Baroque and Renaissance portraiture. As always, there is an element of ancestral and spiritual presence within the surrounding figures and speaks to the persistence of past energies, stories, and lessons that hide in the backgrounds,” says Brionne. Within her works, Brionne carries past insights and histories as guidance as the present unfolds and she looks to the future, with particular care paid to environmental adaptation in the face of a rapidly changing landscape. A recurring and central motif, water conveys its power as a transformative and migratory force that shapes the land and simultaneously submerges its history.

Through a language of abstraction that explodes with energy, Paul Verdell has come to recognize his painted canvases within the realm of drawing, focused more on heavy mark-making with giant oil pastels than on the use of paint and brush. Increasingly fed by pure movement and gesture, rather than hinting at physical references to nature, Verdell's newest works are born from existence and reflection within the natural world. Where he once found inspiration in loosely mimicking the organic lines of foliage and flowers, the artist now responds to pure feeling. As his practice has evolved, Verdell has begun to nurture an unconscious and fundamental responsiveness wherein experimentation and play have taken over. Engaged across a number of canvas and paper works at the same time, he transfers and blends paint between surfaces where each becomes a tool in the making of the others; as such, he creates a continuous loop of relationships between them, building a family of works that share the same DNA. Verdell’s movements, marks, and decisions may obey or defy muscle memory, but each manifests the next and so it goes until he steps back to take in the works, made as much through the artist as by the artist.