Isabelle Brourman: Will Shott Gallery, Exhibit 1: Paper Trail
At a tiny hole-in-the-wall gallery on New York’s Lower East Side is Exhibit 1: Paper Trail, a disinctive collection of work by courtroom artist Isabelle Brourman. Her artworks are unlike the more realistic illustrations typically produced by courtroom artists. The pieces depict Donald Trump’s various court battles in the past two years. Her sketches reveal the theatrical frenzy of the current American psyche and are a document of the increasingly absurd political climate under the new Trump administration.
With what Brourman describes as “Tasmanian-devil glamour style,” cartoony, adrenaline-filled sketches capture the strange spectacle of the courtroom in a fast and wild manner. Caricatured faces capture not only the defendant but are morphed with depictions of all the players in the room: the judge, jury, lawyers, and the witnesses. The illustrations are layered with strings of testimonies, becoming a visual record of the courtroom atmosphere itself.
“The work knows more about the trial than I do,” says Brourman. This is evident in pieces like "Gauntlet Press Conference" and "I Want to See It,” where Brourman’s improvisational style allows those not present in the court proceedings to truly feel the messiness of the moments. Instead of keeping her gaze out of the sketches, as typical courtroom artists do, she is open about her political views and leans into her own experience of being a part of a media-sensationalized trial.
“I never broke the rules — except for my JUUL, but I never got caught.” (Brourman).
While she may be “trespassing the tradition,” her work still gained the respect of both sides of the political system without pandering to either of them, and it even captured the attention of President Trump himself, who later sat for her as she painted him in Mar-a-lago.
What begins as a quick jot of dialogue grows into a fleshed out snapshot capturing the tension, energy, and weirdness of the courtroom.
- Trinity Vu
I like all of the descriptions that emphasize the hectic feeling of both the trials and the illustrations. Words like “schizophrenic” and “jazz-like frenzy” communicate your point well. The quotes that you pulled from Brourman are funny and also help to convey a sense of adrenaline-filled American-politics-as-art chaos. Some of the quotes toward the end of the third paragraph could be taken out, explained, or altered in some way, as I think that they are less necessary in your description of the show. Also, it could be helpful to explain what specifically “Gauntlet Press Conference” and “I Want to See It” portray that is so essential to Brourman’s work.
ReplyDelete(Also, spelling note for paragraph 2, dialogue refers to conversational English while dialog is typically used to describe computer text… I had to look this up…)
The diction in your writing never fails to provide not only an apt description of content but also convey the feeling and sense of the actual work. I mean "layered with strings of testimony" works on so many levels, even just mirroring the chaotic strands of "all the players" in the works with the confusion of testimonies from different witnesses. I am equally impressed with how your writing also remains impartial, reflecting the work itself. You could have easily slipped into a political side, but remained focused purely on the work. I think if anything the last sentence is kind of unnecessary, or could be brought up to the strength of the rest of the writing.
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