BIO
BORN
1976 - Aiken, SC
EDUCATION
1999 - BFA, University of South Carolina
SELECT CLIENTS
The New Yorker, Netflix, Vice Magazine, Urban Outfitters, Marc O’Polo, Square Enix, Society6, Columbia University Press, in4mation, FM-84
Hollis Brown Thornton, who goes by Brown, is an American artist known for paintings, drawings, and prints that explore memory, fragmentation, and the passage of time. Born in 1976 in Aiken, South Carolina, Thornton earned a BFA from the University of South Carolina in 1999. After living in Chicago from 2001 to 2005, he returned to Aiken, where he continues to work from his warehouse studio.
Using acrylic and oil paint, permanent marker, and a pigment transfer process developed over several years, Thornton creates images that blur the line between recollection and erosion. VHS tapes, cassettes, early personal computers, family photographs, and fragments of vintage popular culture appear throughout the work, often partially erased, simplified, or obscured through pixelation and layered surfaces.
His work focuses on the imperfect way memory is stored and reconstructed, combining analog textures and fragmented imagery to create spaces that feel familiar yet uncertain. Thornton’s work has appeared in exhibitions, publications, and collections connected to clients including The New Yorker, Netflix, and Vice Magazine. Working across painting, drawing, and printmaking for more than two decades, he continues to develop a body of work centered on memory, absence, and transition.
©DrakeWhite, 2026
INTENT
My work is mostly about memory and time—how images and objects remain after their original context is gone. I think of the work as a kind of residual memory: an attempt to collect and give physical form to something that can no longer be completely recovered.
I use familiar imagery, often drawn from photographs, television, and other recorded sources. Stencils allow me to preserve the structure of those images with a certain precision while reducing them to essential shapes. In that sense, the process functions something like memory itself—selecting, simplifying, preserving certain information while losing other parts along the way. The hard edges give the images the authority of something recorded, evidence that a person or place existed, while scrubbing, washes, erasure, and abrasion undermine that certainty.
I'm interested in the tension between those two things: something can feel definite and incomplete at the same time. The edge can say this existed, while the rest of the image says this is all I can recover. The result is something familiar but also distant and unknowable—an artifact of an experience that can never be fully reconstructed.