BRIAN SERWAY

LADEN FISSURES

solo exhibition

January 18th - February 16th, 2025

Opening Reception: First Friday, February 7th, 2025 ​

​

Arch Enemy Arts presents LADEN FISSURES, a series of seven drawings by Brian Serway. Depicting a dark and magical narrative fantasy, an unnamed boy and his dog awaken to another realm that is marked by a strange and colossal landscape. Serway takes compositional cues from Caspar David Fridrich’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” to explore the aesthetics of sublime perception, pinning his protagonist face-to-face with the awesome (and awful) boundless forever. 

​

“LADEN FISSURES is about the heavy cracks that weigh on the mind if unable to distinguish dream from reality and the pull one place has over another. I like to explore the emotional perception of one’s sense of place, and with this series more than ever, I am trying to build a story around that feeling…I am entranced by the connectivity between the cosmos and the souls that reside in it.  There’s this primordial beauty in the fact that we are so insignificant to the scope of the sun; and yet, we ourselves are made from star stuff.”

​

These ideas really lend themselves to Serway’s style and medium. His use of black and white watercolor and graphite, with details practically carved into (or out of) the negative space, have this nebulous sense of dissolving form. His drawings are fluid and melting. They traverse the page with momentous shifts of darkness and scale in relatively small and contained compositions. LADEN FISSURES gives a sense of representational formlessness, the overwhelming expanse of space and time, and our “inconsequential place in it all.”

 

Brian Serway is based in Johnson City, Tennessee. Primarily self taught, his work is deeply inspired by the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia, the region’s mysticism and folklore. He is the owner and curator of HollerHouse, a gallery and retail space in Bristol, VA that is dedicated to contemporary art and artists of Appalachia. Serway began showing with Arch Enemy Arts in 2020 after submitting to our Spotlight Showcase, and LADEN FISSURES is his third solo feature with the gallery. 

​

LADEN FISSURES will be on view from January 18th - February 16th, 2025
Sold works will begin to ship the week starting February 23rd, unless other rush shipping arrangements have been made. Items marked with a red dot have already been sold.

​