"BACKYARD SPECTACULAR" BY GREGORY VOLK
Backyard SpectacularIn complex and varied work, largely accomplished over the past 17 years while she has lived as an American in Berlin, Laura Bruce has explored and excelled at paintings, sculptures, videos and, in a couple of instances, performances. Now Bruce has pared her complex art down to a seemingly rudimentary basis: large black and white graphite drawings on paper. Think of this as a normal career trajectory in reverse; instead of moving from drawings to paintings then videos, she has done the exact opposite, and to remarkable effect. Bruce’s drawings of quintessentially American houses and yards, and of people outside those houses, are visually enthralling, with all their intricate mark-making, nuances of color (in a palette that is black and white), and juxtapositions of plenitude and emptiness. Throughout, fractious activity abuts moments of beatific serenity, while scruffy and unruly zones merge with those which are delicate and ethereal. Bruce’s talents as a quirky image-maker are pronounced, but what’s even more compelling is the profound (and conflicted) humanity these drawings exude.
In “Thicket,” an absorbing nature scene depicts trees, a clearing, and a lovely cloud-filled sky. It takes time to discover an almost ghostly old man partially hidden in some brush: an entrancing figure whose expression is resigned, tender, fearful, vulnerable, and contemplative at the same time. In “Oil Lawn” a man mows a lawn in front of his house and car. On one level this scene is completely banal: an average, slightly overweight, obviously chipper homeowner in Bermuda shorts tending his typical property (which no doubt looks similar to all the other property in the neighborhood) on a summer afternoon. The lawn, however, rendered from thousands of short, slightly askew horizontal marks, is at once intact and unstable and seems ready to start buckling and fissuring, while the house tilts slightly and seems rickety; it is a cherished, yet precarious, refuge. The foliage, towering trees, and expansive sky near the house are powerful and dynamic; in several instances the light gray outlines of trees merge with billowing white masses suggestive of both gorgeous clouds and ominous smoke. There is frank magic in these trees and this sky: an unexpectedly wild and spectacular backyard environment that posits heightened consciousness, possible ecstasies, palpable catharsis. There is also crisis, because this suburban nature unnervingly resembles a conflagration, for instance a forest fire or a war zone, merging the suburban idyll with a political and social precariousness of community or existence. It is certainly the case that Bruce’s drawing seems beset by anxieties and an unsteady reality. This portrait of one homeowner performing a chore doubles as a riveting portrayal of an insecure sense of home, of making do in a time of conflict and raw doubt. A similar thing happens with “Pietà,” in which a man has shot a deer directly behind his house. The sacrificed deer, seen front and center, is haunting, and rather than satisfaction the hunter’s posture and expression communicate consternation, bewilderment, and uncertainty. Bruce’s drawing of a hunter with his kill deftly evokes a nation that has energetically blundered into violence, and is now convulsed by the consequences.
Nature, of course, in Bruce’s native suburban New Jersey or exurban Atlanta, in innumerable other places in America and indeed Europe as well is decidedly tamed, manipulated, and circumscribed. Manicured lawns, a few leafy trees, a patch of woods separating one house from the next in a housing development—these are all examples of nature usurped by suburban and exurban sprawl, and transformed into so much cultural décor. In Laura Bruce’s drawn suburban “snapshots” this circumscribed nature suddenly becomes exceptionally powerful and majestic, but also threatening and unnerving. In “The Wait,” a man and his dog, outdoors beside the family car, gaze at both white and black trees which once again resemble fire and smoke, but which also seem to be intensely, perhaps magically, illuminated and imbued with soul-shaking powers. This is one of many instances when Bruce’s 21st century drawings reveal a 19th century aptitude for vastness and wonderment. There are visual echoes of European Romanticism in Bruce’s vigorous trees and bedazzling skies, for instance John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, and Caspar David Friedrich. All are known for enraptured, psychologically charged landscapes (spanning fear and awe), while Constable’s many paintings of Dedham Vale and Friedrich’s many paintings of Dresden and its surroundings locate this rapture and power not in some fabulous and remote elsewhere but in close to home vistas (an approach which Bruce very much shares). Bruce’s drawings, while painstakingly made, also conjure instantaneous experiences, fleeting moments of revelation and surprise when one’s whole orientation is suddenly altered, challenged, and intensified.
In “North,” a man routinely walks his dog down the street, but the familiar environs have morphed unpredictably. Small trees and their cast shadows (and the small trees appear to be spinning like cyclones), huge leaning trees overhead, houses that are perhaps smoldering, a tumultuous sky overhead, and in the middle of it all what could easily be the funnel of a tornado make the whole scene at once awe-inspiring and dangerous. You also surmise that there is a total traffic between this man’s inner life and the external environment, an almost ego-less exchange between self and world. Such an exchange also happens in “Black Field Communion.” A man who has walked a bit uphill from his house and car is walloped by the environs, when some kind of weird energy vector sears into his brain. He’s an average citizen abducted not by aliens but by the normal nature in his suddenly spectacular backyard, and the experience is both transformative and terrifying. In his influential 1757 treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke identifies sublime experiences in nature with astonishment, fear, danger, reverence, and a sense of the infinite.
Call Laura Bruce’s mesmerizing drawings her suburban sublime, with their abundant beauty, trepidation shading into terror, and convincing air of the marvelous.
Gregory Volk