In May of 2003, I moved back from Boston, where I was in college, to my hometown in Cleveland County, Oklahoma to recover from severe depression and insomnia. One evening I found myself standing on a heap of construction debris to get a better view to photograph the sky, which was lit up with the pink streaks of an exceptionally brilliant sunset. But what caught my attention was clouds of smoke streaming from the roof of my family’s home. Needless to say, I never took photos of the sunset.
Luckily, my family wasn’t harmed but the attic of our home was destroyed. Still, we were forced to move from our rural home to a small apartment in Midwest City, Oklahoma where I took up residence on the couch. (This was unfortunately my family’s second fire; the first, in 1999, is represented in another series of paintings.) Not long after the move, I went to work as a cleaner at Crest Foods, a local grocery store. At 7 am I cleaned the bathrooms, and then swept and mopped the aisles of the store. The best part was that I was left alone, working and thinking without any interruptions. As a result I had time to observe and contemplate those around me, my coworkers and the customers: most of them were poor like my family, but in much worse physical shape. It was not uncommon to see severe health problems, ranging from those with visible tumors to those living with significant tooth decay and festering skin conditions. I was moved by the way their hard lives showed in their faces and bodies. While working at Crest I made drawings in my free time about the experience. I would continue to come back to this experience, intermittently, over and over again for the next 20 years.
The portraits are of my coworkers, my three brothers, who would also eventually be hired to work at Crest, and me. I have tried to capture their demeanors and appearances, aided by what I knew about their life stories and how they came to be working at Crest. I used photoshop to composite features from many found photos for the portraits of my former coworkers, taking the nose from one photo and the eyes from another person to reconstruct the likeness I remembered to make references for this series. In each portrait the subject is wearing a black polo shirt, which was our work uniform.
This series has allowed me to understand the arc of my own narrative, from loss and struggle to recovery and renewal. The series took on new significance when my life began to mirror the events that lead me to work at Crest. After becoming ill in 2020 with Lyme disease I moved back to Oklahoma to recover in a less demanding environment than New York City. The Crest paintings begun in New York traveled with me to Oklahoma where I again live one mile from Crest Foods and have made a long journey back to health. Working at Crest was the turning point in recovering my health and reentering the world. Similarly having this show of Crest paintings feels like crossing a threshold back into the world.
Crest Foods Sept. 6th to Oct. 14th 2023 at Sargent’s Daughters New York, NY
Bryan Martin, “Brandi Twilley’s Grocery Store Therapeutics,” Frieze Magazine, New York, NY
Brandi Twilley 