Marshall Brown: Palaces and Prisons

In his seminal essay “The Monuments of Passaic” (1967), Robert Smithson narrates a tour of his hometown, a postindustrial wasteland in which a deteriorating bridge and the construction of a new highway coexist in “unitary chaos.” For Smithson, both are monuments—one the relic of an unrealized past; the other an imminent ruin. They are markers of entropy that cast the city as “an abandoned set of futures.”

The collage works of artist and architect Marshall Brown on view in “Palaces and Prisons” at Western Exhibitions similarly evoked scenes of urban transition and decay, yet fostered a syncretic and somewhat more hopeful view of the contemporary cityscape. Combining found photographs (whole or partial) of buildings excavated from art and architectural history and bits of landscape, Brown creates dynamic new topographies that reframe the past to imagine alternate, speculative futures. 

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