Today we’d like to introduce you to Wallace Browne.
Wallace, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, to a humble artistic family of musicians, hair stylists, painters, and other eclectic creatives. Despite a modest upbringing, I was fortunate to have been immersed in local museums, music venues, and art galleries. From a very early age, I began to study facial expressions, body language, and the effect of vulnerability in emoting on others, especially strangers. As I got older, I noticed a pattern of drawing parallels of everything around me to art in addition to performing and creating it.
When I was 14, my family was going through a difficult time with divorce, which was especially hard as we were all very close and had done everything together. In addition, I had yet to detox from large doses of Adderall that I had been taking since I was 8, which was prescribed to me as someone who is neurodivergent. Unfortunately, during this troubling time in my life, I entered a relationship with a man that was older than myself that lured me in through the familiar comfort of being involved in the world of art. He proceeded to groom me for the next 7 years, and throughout this relationship, he abused me mentally, sexually, and eventually physically. What I had hoped would be an escape into beauty evolved into a living nightmare. I also realized my world of art had gotten so small I could almost no longer see it. After a series of altercations with him that almost ended in me losing my life, I managed the courage to leave and return home to LA to reconnect with the city that I loved and rediscover myself.
Now I was faced with the task of healing. Though I learned to cope through many different ways, art and helping others through mutual support was the only path that was able to help me find peace with my trauma. Admiration became a fixation, and all I wanted to do was paint all night and go to art openings every weekend. For my paintings, I started working more with unconventional materials and processes. These included organic ash, encaustics, and blades, as well as melting down plastics and using small bits of gauze soaked in my own blood from prior oral surgeries. It’s almost inexplicable to describe the comfort that depicting the horrors I went through onto my canvases gave me, as well as immersing myself back into the world through my own perspective. I found a home in the Los Angeles art community again and began working at my first gallery in 2022. I’ve continued to grow my body of work in any way I can and keep falling in love with the art world more and more every day.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I’ve always struggled with the difficulties of being neurodivergent and it being an unrecognized condition. This condition became a huge obstacle in my childhood, adolescence, and even in my adult life. Having mental disorders which can easily go unnoticed gave me a huge sense of grief because people would treat me poorly as they saw my struggles as an act of defiance, laziness, or even negligence. This resulted in me feeling very much at odds with explaining my conditions. This also caused me to struggle to ask for help when I needed it, which unfortunately would echo throughout my life and foreshadow my future.
As I previously touched on, I was also impacted by recurring mental, emotional, sexual, and physical abuse that had afflicted me the most during the 7 years of my life with my abuser. I’ve always felt very helpless because of my past, and this became amplified by him isolating me and moving me away from home to a different state for 3 years. Within those 3 years, the abuse continued and progressed. In addition to it becoming more regular, it increased in severity when he attempted to kill me, which occurred on multiple occasions.
That being said, there was a liberating knowledge I gained through these traumatic times. I’ve always had a deep desire to nurture people in the world around me in an unspoken way, but after facing my mortality head-on, this gave me the courage to extend that more tangibly. It also reinforced my appreciation for strangers as I viewed them and their stories as works of art. I recognized how important it is to just make people feel truly seen. To feel acknowledged. I feel we need to be more understanding and to lead with love because you never know what an individual is facing.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’m a visual mixed medium and performance artist. I became fascinated with visual arts and captivated by how its inverse generated emotions that manifested into a physical form. I then became consumed with this concept: What if the unknown horrors in my brain were able to represent its damage as something tangible, and what would it look like? I then took those emotions and thoughts to the canvas.
I find the process euphoric in being able to capture the visual of what felt like an internal war. However, I didn’t want to create with the intention of purely coping. I want to provide the viewer with a sense of release, a sense of feeling seen and heard. I aim to extend my art as a branch of my love to them. An unspoken nod of understanding from another person standing alongside them in the fallout.
I specialize in unconventionality in almost every sense. I find myself working with melting plastics, blades and ash as they can be perceived as remnants of hazardous materials. This represents a side of the brutality that registers with me on a deeper level. I also love pushing myself to work with these materials as their dangerous connotation embodies a familiar comfort to me. In my performance work, I push my existential boundaries by testing my safety and vulnerability as a statement.
I believe what sets me apart from others is that being driven by visually emoting is a part of who I am at my core. My perception of beauty through the lens of dark and light manifests itself into my physical presentation, which allows me to live my life as a performance piece. Every interaction, every conversation, every movement, every moment I try to curate with the intention of leaving behind a greater impact that lingers after I’ve left the viewers’ presence. However, I ultimately hope to leave people with the feeling that they are living and breathing art themselves.
I’m very proud of the exhibition I curated most recently in DTLA titled “Bound and Determined.” It was a group show that explored diverse narratives of being in, getting out of, and healing from traumatic events. It’s very important to me to bring sensitive topics to the light in the art community because the more we humanize our grief and hardships, the more likely we can reach people that are experiencing them. I was very fortunate to work with three incredibly talented artists, and I also had my own works featured in it as well.
What are your plans for the future?
I want to continue to uplift and inspire as many individuals as I can through my work, as well as contributing to other artists as a model, curator or fellow performer. My dream is to own my own gallery where anyone who wants to discover or create art alongside of me can from all walks of life
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @theartofwallace
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa3fDXc83YA&ab_channel=ERICMINHSWENSONARTFILMS
Image Credits
John Greer
Eric Min Swenson
Joni Sternbach
Dom Victoria
Guigen Zha
Ivaylo Angelov
