Karen Brooks & Carlene Carter
Featuring artworks by: Karen Brooks, Chris Simpson, and Jim DeVault
About the Exhibition:
Unrequited Leisure is pleased to present an evening of art and music!
April 16 – 30, 2019
Artist Reception and Performance: Friday, April 26, 5:00-8:00pm.
Performance starts at 7:00pm.
Unrequited Leisure is pleased to present Karen Brooks, a visual artist as well as a Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter/recording artist, in her first gallery exhibition. The exhibition will also include selected sculptural works by artist Jim DeVault and Nashville-based musician and sculptor Chris Simpson, who will accompany Brooks in a special performance April 26.
About the Artist:
Karen Brooks is best known as a country music singer and songwriter who wrote a series of singles recorded by Emmylou Harris, Rosanne Cash, Patty Loveless, Tanya Tucker, Russell Smith, David Allen Coe, Crystal Gayle, and Exile. She won a Grammy for her contribution to the soundtrack for the Sesame Street movie, Follow That Bird, and sang a duet with Johnny Cash, titled, I Will Dance With You. She went on to record, Faking Love, with T. G. Sheppard, which was a number-1 hit for three weeks on the Billboard country chart in February 1983. She also had a number of Top 40 hits as a recording artist on Warner Bros. Records. Brooks is an unconventional storyteller who has led an extraordinary life. In this body of work, much like her songwriting, Karen displays her innate ability to craft a narrative. Through these works, she has developed a cast of characters and brought them to life in a series of vignettes, each one unique and embedded with its own history. In this, her first formal gallery exhibition, she presents a variety of mediums: painting, drawing, and digital media. Her approach is immediate and intuitive, pulling out stories that present themselves through the process of layering her images. A recurring subject in her work is the sad clown, which could be interpreted as an amalgamation of her experiences as an entertainer and her work on the pro-rodeo circuit. Brooks says her “fascination with Clowns is an ongoing thing… what do they feel when they are not making people laugh.”