Audra Townsend: Brazen

Audra Townsend, 2023. Photo: Julie Doro.

Audra Townsend’s first solo exhibition: Brazen

July 11 – August 3, 2023
Opening Reception: Saturday July 15, 4-7 pm
Artscape Weston Common Hallway Galleries, Toronto

Brazen is to be bold and not care what others think about you. Through Brazen, Audra, a local Toronto artist, shows the rewarding nature of art and a creative career to younger artists, particularly Black artists. The colour, shapes and textures encapsulate her experiences from 2019 to 2023. During that time, she painted and created, through grief, writer’s block, social anxiety, family conflict and COVID-19 isolation towards self-actualization and self-transcendence, an expansion of personal boundaries to thinking about much broader issues.

About the Artist

Audra Townsend is a free-spirited British-born African Canadian (Afro Jamaican Canadian) abstract and mixed media artist living and painting in Toronto. She is trained as a Sociocultural Anthropologist, who believes art manifests our curiosity about the material world as humans, regardless of race, ethnicity or nationality. As such, it is an essential part of what it means to be human. Audra borrows from intuitive and tactile art forms to explore this relationship between art and the human experience. Her work is characterized by a dense network of crisscrossing lines separating rectangles of multiple shapes made of different materials, earthy and celestial colours (e.g., blues, yellows, greens and browns) and various textures. Audra sometimes uses sand or stone in her paintings and creates abstract collages using Shin Noodle packaging materials to spice things up. These alternating physical and visual surfaces and textures stimulate the viewers of her work.

Brazen has been made possible through the following. Audra is being mentored by Gloria Swain, a prominent African Canadian abstract artist also based in Toronto. Brazen is being hosted by the Artscape Weston Commons and has been funded by the Toronto Arts Council.