'Diedrick Brackens and Katherine Bradford' at the Carpenter Center for Visual Art
For roughly a year and a half we’ve maintained our distance to the best of our availabilities. Yet total isolation is neither possible nor reasonable for humans as creatures. So, we size up other bodies against environmental context and evaluate relative risk of infection with the tacit understanding that one day we will mis-calculate the air born traces of another and hope that went our number is called, it won’t be so bad. With the distant and dear flattened on the same plane of pathogenetic vector, carefully we select the levels of in-person indulgence we can afford.
Cultural institutions have been no less absolved from the need and responsibility of having to consider the risk of receiving or attracting multiple bodies at a time. Perhaps this point was most driven home by Gov. Cuomo in April of 2020 insisting that “there will be no attractive nuisances”[1] alluding to the inessential esteem in which his administration held museums when the state began to reopen. With the specter of the figure—it’s vulnerabilities, risks and rewards—so foregrounded in our day to day, is there a more salient subject for a museum to take on as the exhibition announcing their reopening and return to public programming?
The eponymously named exhibition Diedrick Brackens and Katherine Bradford unites textile works and paintings by two artists whose works bear a common thread of studio-based introspective meditation. Largely, though not exclusively, this selection of pieces maintains a formal gaze on human figures depicting bodies negotiating both pictorial space and one another. While the presentation offers the works of two artists set in dialog, it is undeniably impossible to ignore the exhibition’s implicit third aerosolized presence.
According to the press release “Brackens and Bradford’s works resonate within our moment of heightened emotion, isolation, and introspection in the midst of profound change to our social, economic, and public health realities.” By honing in on works that emphasize a meditative hand through studio-based practice, the exhibition harkens to the interior horizons of thought that solitude opens. Though studio practices are never hermetically solitary, these works speak to the experience of isolation as they are pieces that are ultimately produced by each artist as opposed to post-studio artists’ practices which rely on teams of assistants and contracted fabricators. Speaking across generational, gender, race and sexuality divides, Brackens and Bradford’s work finds formal kinship in their treatment of figure and ground, craft, and color.
With a little over half of her paintings produced pre-pandemic, Bracken’s work alludes to the painter’s labor as one that was perhaps best positioned to withstand confinement. But even in the monastic quiet of pallet and brush, how alone is alone? Bradford’s work is clearly in dialogue with a broad range of figurative painting practices. In All of Us (2018), white triangular legs marching on a pink ground offer a whiff of Philip Guston, there’s some early Dana Schutz in her approach toward the figure as blocks of planes. Mother Knows (2020), brings to mind the charged psychic tension between adults and children in various states of undress in Eric Fischl’s work. With the president’s son’s painting recently in the news cycle, One Man’s Tub (2018) might provoke a mind wander to George W Bush’s bathing self-portraits. Less than suggest he has managed to scrub away his sins than that 45’s filthy mis-dealings, including his handling of the pandemic, have made 43’s own dirt seem clean by comparison. Brackens presents the bathing protagonist stretched out, vaguely decent in his tightie-whities, and holding the viewers’ gaze as if to say about everything we’ve witnessed since 2017, “that was some real weird shit.”[2]
Bradford’s ghostly brushy paint handling conveys a painters’ paintings approach. The lushness of the swirls of paint on the surface foreground the paint itself as protagonist and build psychic atmosphere. Suspended between abstraction and representation the way she arranges forms within the rectilinear space of the canvas is as much conceptual content as mere formal instrument. There is a violence to her geometry. In New Shoes(2019) the image is cut in half, almost like a movie film strip that has been stopped between the cells. Feet and the titular shoes in question hang down from the top of the picture plane threatening to stomp the heads and shoulders of the people below. Are we seeing an odd arrangement of bodies repositioned to highlight how shoes are often a giveaway of the real status of a person? Or does the positioning of the feet above these other heads imply other different figures off frame who are positioned above and therefore standing on the people below? Her painting of two boxers, locked in embrace or combat is the most jarring of the show eliciting a kneejerk “what, no masks?” response.
Bracken’s works are no less odd, though their brand of weird takes a completely different tack. His tapestry works incorporate various textile techniques including West African weaving and Southern US quilting traditions which have served as a language of storytelling and resistance in black history. Quilt as memory is an important cultural thread to highlight here. The scale of the heartbreak of Covid renders it easy to forget that the SARS-coV-2 is not the only pandemic our world has withstood in recent memory. The Aids Quilt, remains perhaps the most emblematic work of textile activism on the yonder side of a homespun pussy hat. Today it continues to travel around the US and the world, spreading comfort by visualizing loss and celebrating memory. Occupying the intersectional space of a black queer man, a community for whom HIV also extracts a disproportionately heavy toll, Brackens draws on these diverse references, elaborating figures whose dreamy spectral presences seem to exist more on the astral than the physical one. His weavings, with the craft’s suggestion of nimble fingers deftly twisting tensile threads makes the figures, whether lovers, horses, anal catfish or a Rottweiler are more of the image than on it. The figures in nuclear lovers (2020) seem to occupy a magical dreamscape dissolving back and forth into one another and space in regenerative synchronousness. While what depths (2020) evokes a poignant hope for transcendence, “The catfish, my work’s faithful attendant, here sharpens the narrative. What does it mean to identify with the bottom feeder, the scavenger? Can the irredeemable be made precious?” Even in his abstract works the figure is never fully fugitive. Through stitching and weaving the body of the artist is always present in the tactility of the material. In pieces like rouge test (2017) and invisible life (2017) he incorporates mirror elements that capture the viewer, the room, and the light with the embedded silvered surfaces.
Diedrick Brackens and Katherine Bradford is a soft open. This is not a throw open the doors block buster built for glad-handing and hob-knobbing. It’s comforting textiles and delicious paint. Approachable, domestically proportioned, wall art relieved of the various echelons of vernissage obligations. We know the body keeps the score[3] of accumulated trauma, so there’s a logic to deploying gentleness as a curatorial gesture to extend the labor of care beyond the work and the artists to include the viewer and the bodies seen and unseen that make up institutions.
Creeping out from our isolation after eighteen months of uncertainty and sequester, ease appears to be the point. The Carpenter Center opens its doors to world as the US crosses the threshold of 700,000 souls[4] lost to Covid-19. As we learn to negotiate masked inhales and exhales, ingresses and egresses, curves, corners and straightaways of buildings and bodies amidst the temptation to get back to our over-scheduled pre-pandemic rhythms, there’s an appeal here to take it slow.
Image credit: Left: Diedrick Brackens, shape of a fever believer, 2020. Woven cotton and acrylic yarn, 84 x 82 inches. Courtesy of the artist; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles. © Diedrick Brackens. Right: Katherine Bradford, Brothers, 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 80 x 68 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Canada, New York. Photo: Jason Mandella.
[1] https://www.syracuse.com/coronavirus/2020/04/no-attractive-nuisances-when-ny-starts-reopening-bad-news-for-nys-fair-concerts.html
[2] https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/326438-george-bush-after-inauguration-that-was-some-weird-s-t-report
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/sep/20/trauma-trust-and-triumph-psychiatrist-bessel-van-der-kolk-on-how-to-recover-from-our-deepest-pain
[4] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-toll/
