Kit Brown and Huston Ripley : Drawn Out and Shot

Drawn Out and Shot, a dual exhibition by Kit Brown and Huston Ripley, opens at Projects Gallery on Friday, November 2. The exhibition continues through Saturday, December 29. There will be a First Friday reception November 2 from 5 to 8 p.m. The reception is free and open to the public.

Uniting two friends from across the Atlantic Ocean, Drawn Out and Shot utilizes different mediums to explore personal perspectives on sexuality and the human experience. Huston Ripley’s obsessive drawings and Kit Brown’s cheeky black and white photographs are synergistic in imagery and materials.

Kit Brown, a Paris-based artist, infuses his photography with a sensual yet light-hearted approach to his figurative subject matter. In stark black and white photo prints, nude figures demonstrate the erotic and absurd, teasing the line between fetish and farce. Often combining the urbane with a sense of comedy, the fanciful with pornographic suggestions, Brown’s investigation of these figures is with a frank openness, neither clinical nor salacious.

Philadelphian Huston Ripley composes masterful and meticulously detailed ink drawings with images that radiate and echo like the concentric rings of a mandala. Using a fine point pen and Japanese paper, stacked and folded layer upon layer, Ripley draws only on the top-most surface so the ink bleeds downward, producing “an osmotic image” that fuses Eastern and Western ideas with seamless grace. Geometric wreaths frame the whole. A female presence repeats itself throughout the compositions, mingled with cryptic images of genitalia, reptiles, leering Hindu-esque Gods and a maelstrom of humanity. Ripley’s works are a personal journey into the entire human process, from creation to death and the sweet terrors and peace between.

Both artists received their undergraduate degrees from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Ripley also received his M.F.A. from the Pratt Institute. Both have exhibited extensively in the U.S. and Europe. Drawn Out and Shot brings these two friends together again as they investigate the sacred and the profane in their respectively sensual works.


Projects Gallery is located at 629 N. 2nd St. in Philadelphia’s Northern Liberties section. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Thursday noon to 5 p.m. and Friday and Saturday noon to 7 p.m. A preview of the artist’s works may be viewed on the gallery’s website at www.projectsgallery.com. For more information, please contact Projects Gallery at 267-303-9652 or info@projectsgallery.com.