Artist James Brook exhibition in PC&D Gallery

Ariel #27, Made By The Artist’s Six Year Old Daughter

Extra Mundane, by the British-born artist James Brook, will be on exhibit in the Pennsylvania College of Art & Design main gallery, 204 N Prince Street, Lancaster, Aug. 15 through Sept. 15, 2019.

Brook celebrates the extraordinary in the everyday, drawing upon the visual elements of a television newsfeed, the composition of common readymade household objects, and the canvas of children’s drawings.

Extra Mundane features work created in response to an unexplained phenomenon experienced by 62 schoolchildren in Zimbabwe. This mass witnessing of a silver oval craft landing near their playground and their subsequent drawings were an inspiration for Brook’s own interest in the supernatural.

“Their drawings of their experience led me to revisit my own drawings as a kid,” he says, noting the parallels were uncanny. He is keenly interested in the intersections of high and low art, as well as outsider art, developing these ideas into the show. 

Brook uses the notion of time as material, looking at his own family lineage of artists. His artist mother saved his childhood drawings and gifted them to him for his 40th birthday. He, in turn, offered them to his daughter to copy, and her resulting drawings in response to his own at the same age will be included in the show. 

On First Friday, Sept. 6, the public is invited to attend a 10 a.m. artist’s Gallery Lecture in the PCA&D Atrium.

The Extra Mundane exhibit is open Mondays through Fridays, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Saturdays, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. through Sept. 15, 2019. The exhibit is free and open to the public.