In his essay “Thinking Dark Anew,” the mathematician and astrophysicist Reza Tavakol theorizes the concept of ‘relative darkness,’ in which no place within our universe is truly or inescapably dark. The vacuum of space is always pulsing with wavelengths of energy, visible and otherwise, and darkness must be understood for each species according to the sensitivities of their vision. In this way, it is only human perception’s limited scope which permits us the moment of reprieve that relative darkness represents: a quietness of our visible spectrum amid a vibrant and constantly evolving fabric of pulsing waves. Looking out at the nighttime ocean from her home in Sausalito, the poet and artist Etel Adnan sensed this unseen world, calling it “the rolling of silent matter.”

It’s clear from first glance that Brownstein’s drawings are built laboriously, fastidiously, over weeks and months. In this capacity, they exhibit a kinship to textiles – Olga de Amaral’s suspended installations of twine or Lygia Pape’s concept of ‘weaving space’ come to mind, as do Anni Albers’ experiments with form and structure. Untitled(the diegesis) presents graphite linework as if it were warp interlaced with weft, sometimes tightly pulled, occasionally open and spacious, leading us toward the emptiness behind the lines. The gaze shuttles back and forth between regions of varying density, the converging lines producing a perspectival space of vanishing points that leads the eye to burrow deep into the drawing. Untitled(spearmint) plays on the formality of the grid, zooming in closer and closer until it takes on a spiritual dimension.

During the immediate post-pandemic years in which many returned to work, Brownstein continued to dedicate himself to a solitary practice from an open-air studio he constructed in Long Island. He had spent the previous years working sculpturally with heavy raw materials (wood and concrete) and with the subtleties of light (in photograms). Simultaneously, he began reading the essays of French theorist Michel Serres, who is known for his philosophy of the sciences rooted in communication and networks: the interaction and inseparability of all things from cells to stardust. The image of the star recurs throughout Serres’ writing as a symbol of connection, a source of relation. “[Serres] is talking about every point in space as active, radiant, shining upon every other point. That is how the world is built: not as isolated things, but as things radiating, emitting, and affecting everything else.” Brownstein says. “That became important to me with the five-point star.’

In the condensed selection of drawings on view, Brownstein lays out this endless repetition of hand-drawn stars into fields of possibility, spooling boundlessly towards an imagined horizon. They seem to aim at infinity. The artist stenciled over 23,000 stars in total within a single drawing, 21,500 in a second, and continued this quasi-monastic practice of repetition in further drawings of linear webs and intersecting vectors. The stars, webs, and converging bands follow one another across the unadorned, almost acetic compositional space of tiled sketchbook pages. In the process, they gradually reveal and deepen themselves into a bottomless depth: a sense of the mystic folded within the empirical. 

Graphite dust gathers, collects in lines and rivulets along the seams and creases of the sheets of paper. These smudged traces build up into a residue of action, the trace of the hand and the body moving restlessly, fitfully, building up a charged intensity by working the surface with the same repeated mark. As lines and shapes amass themselves, the fragility of the substrate of paper, its slight tears and fragmentation, produces canyon-like gulfs which separate fields of drawn stars and  clouds of dust; meanwhile the encircling vacuum of unmarked paper frames the active area of mark-making with a sense of possibility.

Upon sustained attention, these harmonized traces of dust and matter, collecting en masse, generate a sense of depth and movement, of dynamic shifting space, which draws the eye inward. What ensues is a subtle optical kaleidoscoping, a rudimentary telescope which pulls us in and draws details out of the apparently simple ground of the drawing. 

In this empty space behind and between the marks, one discovers a field of activity rife with movement, touch, and interaction. The artistic gesture of making/marking is recorded, moving across the composition like the fiery tail of a comet, leaving an afterimage of its creation. Like looking at a bright light which burns across the room when you turn away, these repeated stars remain present, insistent in the mind. Their image rises up into visibility and persists. As Serres writes:

Space, then, is not empty or neutral. It is the dense fabric of crossing relations, 
a network of mutual illumination, where nothing exists in isolation 
and everything participates in continuous exchange.

The drawing in its flatness opens itself to the sky as both the heavens and the void. The material of graphite records each action. The accumulation of gestures pulls the fabric of the universe closer as if to inhale it, understand it, unravel its textures — as if to intuit some mechanism behind its order and disorder, divine the unknowable nature of its ever-shifting character. In its ultimate randomness, every point radiates out and affects the next. Every point is a star.

Fascinated by systems of knowledge and belief, Brownstein installed the back of his panels with two sets of hanging hardware, one upright, the other upside-down, so that each drawing could be hung according to two opposite schemes. This reversibility alters the meaning of his symbols — star, cross, weave — which when upright tend towards institutional correctness and an implicit legibility. When seen inverted, they drift toward a darker energy: an ancient, occult, or ritualistic function. Culturally, the inverted star (or pentagram) surfaces in pagan and satanic circles, as does the upside-down cross, although they both have religious subtexts as well. This ambiguity and uncertainty alters our reading of the work. “If you were to hang one upside down in your foyer and see it every day, I think even in a subtle way your emotional position or psychology would be influenced by that darker orientation,” Brownstein muses.

Gnosticism has been one fundamental fulcrum from which Brownstein’s practice operates and its literary influence from Jorge Luis Borges to Thomas Ligotti has imprinted a particular worldview on his philosophical and artistic wanderings. The wonder and disappointment of our reality and its institutions, the emptiness of commonplace axioms and frameworks, the cruelty and randomness of a cosmology overseen by a false Demiurge – these concerns find expression in his searching, questioning, and revelatory sensibility.

In addition to the five drawings on view, Brownstein created a collection of syncretic amulets cast in silver solder, handing each amulet out personally and allowing guests to select the one to which they are drawn. This gesture extends his project beyond the individual nature of his drawing practice to imbue the exhibition with a sense of connection and generosity. Once distributed, the collection of amulets will comprise an artwork in which the movement, distribution, and extended network of owners and caretakers are linked together in a pact akin to stars in a constellation. Over time, these amulets will transit different neighborhoods and cities, circulating and finding a life of their own after the show’s closure.

Suffice it to say, this is work which does not produce didactic readings or insist on a set meaning of its own. Rather, it constructs a fictive space in which the eye navigates and finds its own logics, expanding that curiosity and openness to larger conversations of human experience in the universe at large. In doing so, Brownstein takes us near the beginnings of space and time and gives us space to wonder.