Danyela June Brown

Artist Statement

My practice is slo, dialectical, distributed, and performative. I call it set-making to invoke the back of house and the multiple meanings of “set” a: neighborhood, hustle/r, well-determined collection, etc. I work alternatively by stimming, collaging and reorganizing information to preserve interiorities, assemble maroonages, and challenge commodity logics. I use free software (Photopea, Inkscape, Canva, screenshot, Zoom, Tinkercad, Github, Google forms, Psytoolkit, Claude, and Smallpdf) to describe hegemony; I host, document, reproduce, amplify, emote and mark time to scaffold an elsewhere/beforehand locally in my community. The light-handedness of my work is dialogically important because replicability is my primary intention, and I return often to supporting the authorships of other surplus workers despite institutional surveillance, monopolies of creative space, and justificatory scarcities of the competitive.
My studio practice is distributed across web spaces, parks, vacant buildings, lots, vogue sessions, scraps of paper, bodies of water, and intimate conversations. Water in particular has been a frequent container for honoring displacement and reprocessing transitions when private spaces frustrate those projects by enforcing mastery and universality. I believe that studios make art and that the artist’s work is in the being vessel—my sets then are equal parts installation and roadmap—at their best they are love/non-metaphorical places where Black trans women and other surplus workers can develop their own pedagogies for nesting and theory building auto-ethnographically.
I was raised in a military family, and in a megachurch, and in DC’s Kiki ballroom scene. I have organized with For The Gworls, DMV Kiki Nights, and in my current role as a Permanent Supportive Housing Intake Specialist at DC DHS, prioritizing peer support and sustainable autonomy. My work in Housing breaks my heart daily—bridging the canyon between clients’ self-determination and austerity-based social services—because oftentimes compassionate problem-posing is the only recourse to chronic under-served-ness. Most of my untitled works arise from such a dialectic, e.g. untitled (A Townhome With A Carport In Georgetown), because who am I to tell anyone that their living standards are unreasonable (or better yet a fear induced mirage) when the Housing First model houses the homeless people in market-rent communities that treat our folks like an infection. I am also returning more and more at the behest of my ancestor pool to strategies for lineage atonement, participatory archiving, cunt permanence, and spiritual technologies to the extent that these ends are undetectable to politics of sculpture and choreography. When my precious objects don’t stand and my propositions don’t traffic, the time spent is like a trace number straight to the ancestors. Hypothetical social services that would be logistically impossible to support…funerary rites without the living…my becoming-body attenuated by everything but natality…constant conjunction is by and large the only proof (with any societal purchase) of the subaltern bind. I can show you better than I can tell you.