A Brutal Affair

Painted scaffolds and embossings on paper, dimensions variable, 2024
Center for Contemporary Art & Culture at PNCA, Portland, OR

A Brutal Affair merges selections of two ongoing bodies of works by the artist: A Brutal Affair and The Scaffold Series. A new series of four silkscreen and lithograph prints, published at the Watershed Center for Print Publishing and Research during Avantika’s 2023 Artist Residency, exemplify the artist’s ongoing explorations on Brutalist architecture.

Overlapping her queries of architecture, impact of scale and abstraction are further explored through Bawa’s installations of The Scaffold Series which began for the artist in 2012. Additionally displayed are large-scale relief prints created from print matrices of reduced scaffold forms, present on the paper with a delicate embossment. Together, these bodies of works are both static and moving in conversation through light & shadow, presence & absence, material processing through iteration and a sentiment of subtle anti-monumentality born from a querying impulse to find beauty in what is both natural and built.

Curator - Hannah Bakken Morris

Photos by Mario Gallucci
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