Céline Browning is an artist born and raised in Chicago. Open engagement with social and political issues is a consistent part of her approach to creating meaningful works of art, and her studio work is specifically engaged in an active exploration of power dynamics in American culture. She began her career in metalsmithing and fibers, focusing on the conceptual potential of functional objects, and while the core of her creative work is conceptually based sculpture, she has also worked in wearables, sound installation, and augmented reality. Her work has been exhibited extensively, most notably through a three-year travelling group exhibition organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum (2017-2020), a solo show at Northwestern University (2019), as well as group shows at the Stony Island Arts Bank (2018), and the Pinakothek Der Moderne in Munich (2014). In 2019, she was named a finalist in the Miami University Young Sculptors Competition. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at the Kentucky College of Art and Design in Louisville, KY.

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About the work in Collective Disquiet:

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Shown here are three pages taken from the artist book American Shadows: A Catalog of Fears in Four States. Set in the spring and summer of 2020, the book is a select timeline of national events and personal anxieties experienced during the first few months of the COVID-19 crisis. Each fear is expressed as a dated journal entry, and is paired with a news article published the same day. The two are symbolically connected and reified using shadowgraphy- the art of hand shadow puppets. The fleeting, insubstantial, and ominous nature of shadows acts as a metaphor for the increased instability and isolation of life during the pandemic. 

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Interview with Celine Browning: Part 1 Part 2

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