Marshall Brown, *Pantheon*, 2020. Collage on archival paper. SBMA, Museum Purchase with funds provided by the General Art Acquisition Fund.

Writing and Photo Editing by Ari Adams

The Architecture of Collage: Marshall Brown is an exhibition and book currently on display at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Consisting of twenty-five of Marshall Brown’s collages, the series exemplifies the artist’s technique of creating architecturally inspired images by means of cutting and connecting photographs and illustrations of buildings to forge new and unique structures that suggest what the future holds for architectural design and the use of space in the physical world.

Through the use of collage, Brown—who is a practicing architect, writer, and associate professor of architecture at Princeton University—creates floating cell-like buildings that exist in a void, completely uninfluenced by surrounding structures. By connecting bits and pieces of contrasting styles of architecture and architectural photography, Brown’s Frankenstein-like structures evoke the architectural studies of Giovanni Piranesi and Paul Citroen’s Metropolis while existing in a world of weightless free-fall. The voids that these structures exist in allow the artist’s vision to flourish, representing the architect’s uninterrupted imagination when it comes to their vision of futuristic architecture, design, and the recontextualization of their histories.

Marshall Brown, *Accretion*, 2019. Collage on archival paper. The Art Institute of Chicago, Purchased with funds provided by The Chauncey and Marion D. McCormick Family Foundation.

“For someone like me,” Brown says during a speech hosted by Santa Barbara Museum of Art, “I'm influenced as much by Marcel Duchamp as I am Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. From Dada to Hip-Hop, many creative practices have really become about the appropriation and transformation of every day through strategic inversions, repositionings, recombinations, defamiliarization.”

Despite these structures being built in a space uninfluenced by other surrounding structures—as well as their futuristic connotations—the buildings are constructed using images of existing and real architecture, which ground Brown’s work both in reality and architectural tradition regardless of the impossibility of constructing the designs in a three dimensional world governed by the laws of physics and gravity.

Marshall Brown, *Chimera 14-09-23*, 2014. Collaged magazine pages, glue on archival paper. SBMA, Museum Purchase with funds provided by the General Art Acquisition Fund.

Brown’s structures, which are entirely new and unique yet well within the canon of photographic and architectural history, are life-like and feel as though they are a scaled-up image of cellular organisms made up of steel and concrete. The designs seem as though they could move using man-made flagella and are governed by the decisions of a nucleus hidden behind concrete walls. The sharp angles that seamlessly flow into smooth curves in Brown’s work invoke feelings of both violence and tranquility as if combining the whistle and screech of a city block with the solitude and warmth of a home or garden. The designs find a delicate balance between modernism and futurism while being completely contemporary.

Marshall Brown, *The Gothic Arch*, 2021. Collage on archival paper. Courtesy Marshall Brown Projects and Western Exhibitions, Chicago.

The Architecture of Collage: Marshall Brown will be on view at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art from October 2, 2022 - January 7, 2023. An accompanying book of the same name has been published by Park Books and distributed by University of Chicago Press and can be found here.