ArtBistro

Created about 1 year ago

Description: Imagine walking into an art museum. For some reason, the room you're in holds paintings from dozens of different periods, movements, and styles. Suddenly, like fast-forward film of a growing tree, the pieces start to expand. As if alive, they swell off their canvases and begin to fill the three dimensional space around you. Finally, you're engulfed. But the growing doesn't stop until you're staring at the cells and molecules of the formerly flat images. If that scene seems like a surreal impossibility, Brandon's exhibit "Was Ist Surrealismus" perhaps comes close. Using what the artist describes as "painting in 3D," the exhibit envelops the viewer in a scene of archetypal historiography. Most of Brandon's imagery will, if only subconsciously, elicit recollections of earlier artists, foregrounding Brandon's own artistic genealogy. The lines comprising the elephantine structure in the center of the gallery, for example, can't help but recall Jackson Pollock's entropic drip painting. The ligamental steel structures, on the other hand, might reference David Smith's surfaces or Donald Judd's metalwork. However, unifying these genealogical disparities is a sense that the display functions as a living organism in which each piece is only a part. The amoebic ancestors of the exhibit may be distinct (even opposing) philosophies, but "Was Ist Surrealismus" synthesizes these oppositions. It suggests that the quasi figural but still abstract forms are archetypal and interactive, no more at odds with each other than a heart is to a lung. The irony of Brandon's synthesis is that nearly all of his materials are tools of division. The central sculpture, for example, invokes Pollock, but is also made out of spray insulation, an item used to isolate sound and temperature. Likewise, the ceramic and steel pieces simulate organic forms, but can't escape their antecedents in architecture and pottery, two disciplines almost entirely devoted to the construction of containers. Brandon's industrially based sculptures thus hypothesize a link between art, organism, and containment where each facet must be viewed in context of the others. As the viewer does this she engages historiographically with the past, awakening to the diversity of its influence and becoming part of Brandon's osmotic being "Was Ist Surrealismus." Jim Dalrymple is a writer and musician who lives in Provo, UT with his wife Laura Rowley. He is currently completing graduate work in English at Brigham Young University, and is writing his masters thesis on literary, cinematic, and artistic representations of the American West.

Category: Installation (Images)

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