Leah Brown and Peter Symons, artists and curators, working independently and together, are major forces behind the art epicenter that is F.A.T. Village in Fort Lauderdale. As head curators of The Projects Contemporary Art Space, they are instrumental in producing massive exhibitions seen during the F.A.T. Village Artwalks on the last Saturday of each month, and often collaborate on large-scale installations. In 2014 they received a Creative Investment Program Grant through the Broward Cultural Division for their exhibition Beep Bop Boop about our changing relationships with technology. They are currently finalists for a Knight Arts Challenge Grant to fund the continuation of the Projects including an expansion of gallery hours and programming.
They will be discussing their mutual development as artists, including their individual work, their collaborative work, and their curatorial practice. They have been working as artists along side each other the past 14 years, and have been each other’s artist assistants for most of the work created over that period of time. This has grown into a dialog about art practices, techniques and methodologies that has organically become a curatorial practice.
Leah is a sculptor and installation artist, whose object-oriented work questions the assumed hierarchical structures of reality through the creation of elaborate tableaux that both illustrate and induce reoccurring dream characters, perpetuating an ongoing narrative that assumes the active agency of the dreamt figures, themselves. Leah was born in Washington, DC, raised in the mountains of North Carolina, and currently lives and works with Peter in Fort Lauderdale, FL. She received her BFA with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design, and her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Miami. She is a recipient of the 2013 South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship.
Peter says of his art: “It is a mental process that imposes definition and distinction upon the visual field. When I look without thought, the visual world shifts, objects fade away, and the visual field reveals itself to be a unified field. In some ways, the act of perceiving is an act of creation. We create a map that overlays what is seen, one that defines objects, places, and all perceivable things. This map differentiates the unified field. We create the image. I am interested in this mental construction.” Peter was born in Ireland and immigrated to the United States at an early age. He received his Bachelors degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and his Masters Degree from the Pratt Institute.
