Brooke Pickett is an artist creating large-scale, abstract paintings that center the performance of female domesticity in the face of ecological disaster. Her monumental still-life works capture the fragility, hopefulness, and dissociation required to actively build a home in the face of environmental destruction. Pulling from 19th-century ideas on womanhood, domesticity, and the concept that a woman’s work is to make hard things beautiful, tolerable, and digestible, Pickett’s works address themes of climate change, homemaking, materiality, mourning, and rebuilding.
Pickett arranges and rearranges everyday domestic items - laundry baskets, colanders, lamp shades, coat hangers, linens - into abstraction through a process of flattening and layering. In her masterful compositions and thick brush strokes, Pickett captures the fragility of our objects and all the hopes we place inside them- order, routine, dimming, comforting, containing, surviving. Pickett places these sentiments and puts them in conversation with what it means to be on the verge of destruction and collapse.
Pickett, born in Louisiana and living in New Orleans, creates in a city that’s on the brink of environmental destruction and acts as a harbinger of climate change around the globe. Off-grid living, underground mutual aid, and alternative networks of care have a strong presence in Pickett’s research and work. Often, Pickett’s titles serve as instructional guides, warnings, and tools. Ranging from Flotation Devices to How to Stay Alive, Pickett’s works offer the viewer the chance to reflect on what it would mean to embrace the direction that we’re headed in, and all that might be necessary to live, thrive, and find beauty.
Through paintings nearly ten feet tall, Pickett casts delicate and broken objects onto canvases too big to ever be broken. With such large-scale works, Pickett monumentalizes our lives on the verge of collapse and allows us to experience the ingenuity required to mend.
In new works, Pickett’s artistic instincts have found a new trust for themselves. Pickett’s latest works feature an evermore vibrant cast of colors, even bolder layering of patterns, and a masterful ability to compose tension on the canvas. Pickett states, “I’m no longer shying away from the domestic, the feminine, and the Southern.” In her latest body of work designed for the Prospect Triennial, Pickett’s work asks the viewer: what if we stay? what if we mend? And, pulling from the marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson—What if we get it right?
In Pickett’s latest body of work, a different future may be possible. The only way to find out is for us to fashion it.
Pickett earned a BA in both Painting and Literature from Louisiana State University in 2002 and an MFA in Painting from the State University of New York at Albany in 2005. She has exhibited at institutions such as the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA; Bravin Lee, NYC; MASS Gallery, Austin, TX; Feral, Mexico City, Mexico; and BOX13 ArtSpace, Houston, TX; among others. Pickett was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Painting at Middlebury College, a member of artist-run gallery The Front, and her work is included in numerous private and public collections, including the New Orleans Museum of Art.