Aimée Henny Brown

Urban Fortress Interiors
— 2020

Urban Fortress Interiors is an analogue collage series, enlarged and re-printed to transport viewers from the nostalgia of past architectural styles into a critical examination of contemporary politics of panic and imagined refuge within domestic spaces.  The works consider current events and definitions of heterotopic spaces – “worlds within worlds, mirroring and yet upsetting what is outside.”(Foucault)  Collage is employed to shift the works beyond the initial context of colonial printed matter, toward an other, no-person’s space, encouraging consideration of how homes have been physically collapsed, exalted and imagined during the pandemic.

Material for this series was printed when fallout shelters were considered a quaint, even paranoid addendum to the mid-century modern house.Current projections of home, however, are often bleak, taking into consideration pandemic illness, social and financial inequalities and perpetual sheltering-in-place. Given isolation protocols and pandemic hoarding, the urban fortress as crisis heterotopia becomes a culturally significant symbol.

Works from the Urban Fortress Interiors series have been featured in exhibitions at Centre [3] for artistic + social practice, Pendulum Gallery, and Fort Gallery.

Research + Development

I am interested in how the often controversial Slavoj Zizek interrogates the notion of 'nature': "Nature is not a balanced totality which then we humans disturb... Nature is a big series of unimaginable catastrophes."⁠
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A large part of this series was a result of considering how interior spaces idealize nature through pattern and decor. A question that remains from this research is what if, instead of romanticizing and fetishizing nature, we considered that there is no separation between nature and ourselves? Both nature and myself are a series of catastrophes...