Jesse Ryan Brown, originally from the suburbs of Atlanta, GA, grew up in a predominantly female household—an environment that quietly shaped his early ideas of masculinity and its ties to power. His practice combines his own photographs with sourced imagery to question and complicate the narratives we construct around power and greed. By pairing the personal with the found, he blurs the line between author and archive, truth and fabrication. This layering exposes how images—whether original or borrowed—carry authority, and how that authority can be mobilized to reinforce or unsettle dominant stories.
Through constructed imagery, Brown examines how masculinity is both performed and consumed—asking who authors these narratives, who benefits from them, and what gets silenced in their repetition.
As both artist and educator, Brown holds an MFA from the Maine College of Art and Design and a BFA from the Art Institute of Atlanta. He is currently Assistant Professor of Photography at Delta State University in Mississippi. His work has been exhibited nationally, including at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, Maine.
—
jesse.ryan.brown.01@gmail.com
