Brooke’s Work – Critique by Rich

Brooke’s piece is a screen print. Although the technique of layering makes it hard to be sure, it seems that there are at least eleven layers of ink laid onto a light blue paper. The way that Brooke spoke about this print strikes me. Brooke said that the artwork is a still from a video. It strikes me that she said this about the artwork as a whole and not merely about the image. Perhaps the image itself holds a certain kind of importance regardless of the medium, regardless of the object in which it takes form. It is also possible that the artist views the video as the primary piece of work, on which the print is dependent. This possibility immediately made it a bit more difficult to interpret the piece. If it is a still from a video, or at least if this is how the artist thinks of it, then I am led to believe that either 'the artwork' lies in the image much more so than the print, or it lies in the video that this print references. This is a video that, right now, I cannot see. There is much context, no doubt, intended to be given us in this video. Still, this composition was chosen in shooting the video, and this moment was chosen as being of importance for the print. Perhaps there is information in the video that is not apparent in the print, but nonetheless, a manifestation of the concept will be present in this work.

In the piece there are forms that appear to be a moth and as many as three caterpillars. There also seems to be a piece of paper with some writing on it that I was not able to read. The forms appear highly stylized at a close distance, yet almost photographic from far enough away. The colors are a very dominant feature of this artwork for me. They are not naturalistic. There seems to be abstraction of both color and form that evokes a strong uneasy mood. I’m reminded of several flavors of surrealism, for different reasons: European surrealism for the strange palette, Midwestern Surrealism for the rough forms, and Magic Realism if for no other reason than the anxious energy this work seems to posses.

The more I looked at the piece, the more I questioned the perspective onto the scene that was unfolding. Was it a scene unfolding on a street curb and sidewalk? Was it on a stone stair step and wooden porch? Was it on the side of an old house or barn with the viewer looking up? This seemed to be an important detail somehow. Maybe I could understand more about what is important about this scene if I knew more about why it was being viewed. Are we crouching down and looking intently, or straining or necks to witness this? Is it seen only by chance? On the sidewalk or a porch, the paper could be placed or discarded as garbage, but on the side of a house, it appears to have been placed there intentionally for display, as if it was of some importance. The caterpillar-like objects are on the edge of this paper, either heading onto it or away from it. The moth itself seems to be facing in the general direction of this paper, as if in acknowledgement of it, but it is also on a different plane in three-dimensional space and therefore seems to lack the connection to it that the caterpillars possess. There is a sense that it may fly away at any moment. The presence of caterpillars and the moth seem to be a reference to an evolution or metamorphosis. Perhaps the paper contains some secret truth about the process of change, or something that has been left behind. Caterpillars go through several stages of change before becoming a moth. They are also in a slow, constant state of growth. Once transformed into a moth, however, this growth is halted. The moth will not grow larger or go through any more major changes. To be a moth is to gain a certain kind of freedom. The abilities are gained to move in a more three-dimensional space, to move with more speed, and to choose to stop only at certain locations of interest. The moth can fly. A being gifted with flight is generally seen as a symbol of freedom. The flighted moth dances elegantly through the air, using the moonlight as a source of guidance, but the caterpillar can only crawl, feeling about its environment almost blindly. The moth is a being meant to have experiences. Meanwhile the caterpillar is perhaps meant to be in a state of growth, still experiencing life, but perhaps this experience is either overshadowed by or led by this goal of personal evolution. This being said, it seems from the strange colors and the overall mood of this artwork that something is either going very wrong with this process, or the process itself is unjust and wrong. The unsettling feeling that I get when viewing the work is something I cannot seem to detach from this idea of personal evolution, growth, freedom, and how those thing affect one’s ability to experience life, both when they are disrupted and even when they are not.It is a tension that seems to remain unresolved.

It’s likely that I cannot understand what this work is ‘about’. What I can say is that there is a definite mood, a strong feeling that is communicated. I’m not even sure that this mood can be pinned into a single description, either, because it seems to change for me with each new viewing. This ability of the work itself to evolve into something else upon a subsequent viewing is perhaps the strongest form of communication I receive from the work.