Akea Brionne: A Dreaming Hour
Cranbrook Art Museum
39221 Woodward Ave.
Bloomfield Hills, MI
On view until Sept. 6
There is another world hiding in plain sight behind a thin veil draped over the physical world. It looks like the trees taking a breath with the wind. Like being able to see the life radiating from a field of flowers who tell us that they are alive, just as we are. A field of grass asking us to stop and chat before we rush to our next meeting. For Akea Brionne, everything in this world is covered with glitter.
Brionne’s first solo museum exhibit, Akea Brionne: A Dreaming Hour, opened at Cranbrook Art Museum on June 20. Her large-scale pieces of Black women finding solace in nature scenes — napping near silent brooks and finding power in forested woods — are encrusted with rhinestones and glitter.
Her process employs several technologies and techniques. First she collages images on a private artificial intelligence server, and the resulting image is fabricated on a digital jacquard loom, producing large textiles. Brionne then uses oil pastels, glitter, rhinestones, faux foliage, and other materials to embellish the image, adding texture and layers.
The pieces in A Dreaming Hour are rooted in afrosurrealist ideology, making visible the “invisible” world of the subconscious that seeps into our dreams. This is where nature becomes personified, not just as a comforting reprieve, but as a living breathing organism with its own personality.
Curly hair on the subjects of these tapestries becomes its own galaxy in a starry night sky. Foliage shimmers with glinting shades of emerald, fern, and chartreuse. Even the blades of grass sticking off the canvas have rhinestones on it. Glitter is embedded so deep into the images it looks like layers of paint.
I dream of joining the woman who has left the safety of her house to lie between pampas grass and daisies in a piece titled “The Earth Kept Me Soft.” Brionne’s sparkling wonderland is the true dimension where Blackness is revered. I would call it otherworldly, but it is of this world.
A Dreaming Hour is a refuge for weary souls and worn hands where we can bask in the comfort of fields of lilies and roses. What a blessing to exist here.
It’s a bit ironic, however, that AI is being employed to help create images of natural landscapes, which, in real life, are being destroyed by its use. Data centers that train generative AI programs use more water to cool its processing units than our natural resources can sustain. Planet Detroit has reported that a mid-sized data center uses approximately 300,000 gallons per day, which is equivalent to around 1,000 homes.
Residents in Dowagiac have filed a class-action lawsuit against operators of a data center across the street from their homes, which they say emits constant noise that has affected their quality of life. If we believe that nature is imbued with the same spirit as human beings — and an intelligence that is much older — are there any ethical uses of a technology that depletes nature and disrupts human life?
Still, there is something about the rhinestones twinkling in a woman’s eyes like diamonds as she peers at me from behind overgrown grass that beckons with me to stay with her. To find rest as I become consumed by a bed of moss.
Akea Brionne: A Dreaming Hour is on view at Cranbrook Art Museum until Sept. 6. An artist talk is scheduled from 3-4:30 p.m. on Saturday, July 18. For more information, see cranbrookartmuseum.org.
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