NEW LONDON, CONN.- The Lyman Allyn Art Museum announced A Colorful Dream, Photography by Adrien Broom, on view through January 8, 2017. This exhibition, an exhilarating holiday season experience for the whole family, features the bold and colorful work of local artist, Adrien Broom.
A Colorful Dream is the latest exhibition in the Lyman Allyn’s Near :: New contemporary series. This family-friendly, interactive exhibition highlights the work of contemporary fine art and commercial photographer, Adrien Broom.
The culmination of a three-year studio project, A Colorful Dream features a colorful and evocative threedimensional installation and large-scale photographs detailing a young girl’s journey as she rediscovers all the colors of the rainbow. While working in her studio, Broom designed and constructed individual sets composed of everything that embodies a particular color; a world of white, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and rainbow. She then photographed a young girl finding and traveling through each monochromatic world, beginning in her all-white bedroom, rediscovering the simple joys of color.
Broom’s project began with a dream about color, imagining what it would be like to awaken in a world without color and then have each color of the rainbow reappear in turn. Adrien and her assistants Kristen Meyer and Tony Palmieri painstakingly traced this narrative of color discovery, constructing sets filled with objects in a particular color and photographing a young girl’s experiences within these colorful worlds. This journey concluded with a rainbow-hued space where objects of multiple colors converged, offering dazzling chromatic range and variety. This magical vision is recreated in the Glassenberg Gallery at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, where Museum visitors will be able to immerse themselves in Broom’s fantasy world through an interactive rainbow forest where they can take pictures of their own!
Interested in fairy-tale themes, Broom creates and documents lush dreamscapes— places that might only exist in fantasy. They are very real, however, constructed from actual objects in three-dimensional space. The magical forest and the photographs explore formal beauty and offer fictive worlds that engage color in visually striking and thought-provoking ways. Designed to evoke and capture a sense of childhood fantasy, they also challenge viewers to consider the meaning of color, vision, and the historic and cultural associations of different hues.
Adrien Broom is a contemporary fine art and commercial photographer based in New Haven, Connecticut. As this installation suggests, Broom's fine art photography often focuses on myth and childhood fantasy, with young women as the protagonists. Her commercial work includes fashion and portrait photography. Broom’s work has been exhibited all over the world at venues such as the Hudson River Museum, NY, the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy, the Florence Griswold Museum, CT, and many galleries.
