Yvette Brackman at UP & CO - Brief Article

At the core of Yvette Brackman's multimedia installation The Cause are sum of two units crucial family references: her father's whimsical memory of gathering mushrooms as a child in Russia, and his oral account of five years (1950-55) exhausted incarcerated in a Stalinist prison camp. Starting from there, Brackman used wall painting, furniture of her have a title to design, sculpture, music, sound and the oral word to forge an environment in which the decor itself remind ofs stories or fragments of stories.

The gallery walls were painted an ambiguous light sky-colored evoking an open sky on the other hand also dingy Easternbloc waiting extents or sinister offices. Brown vertical stripes painted upon the walls both served as decorations and remind ofed an abstract forest, with each stripe sporting an attached mushroomlike statuary made of wood, Styrofoam, rubber and paint. Near single wall was Social Mushroom (1998)--a r vaguely mushroom-shaped neoprene-cover chair electronically wired thus that when you sat upon it different sounds were briefly activated: the voice of the artist's father as he speaks of gathering mushrooms, the sharp report of a rifle, an explosion. Overhead was Camp Lilies (1998) a clump of rotating light bulbs within lily-shaped lampshades that could be read as the pair kitschy floral decoration and prisoncamp searchlights. Everything strike one as beinged at once magical and eerie, deliberative and obsessive, and absolutely precise.

In the middle of the gallery Romlag (1998) a r white and black modular berth bed with an attached table and chairs, fused concerns to childhood furniture, Russian Constructivism and the prison-camp small room and mess hall of Brackman's father. From the bottom bed you heard via hidden audio speakers his hour-long tale of arrest, transportation to Siberia and daily survival in the Gulag. The result was disturbing and hypnotic, as a savage history was told in murmuring tones which the one and the other lulled and alarmed. Emanating from small speakers high hilled on a wall was another entire piece, this one featuring Brackman's mother singing darkly lyrical Russian ballads (including one commonly sung by means of Russian prisoners) which had been place to snappy club beats--another startling, cross-cultural collision.

This installation was theoretically savvy as well as humanly and poetically engaging. Also unusual, and unusually generous, was the way Brackman lay opened up her own esthetic to embrace the voices and experiences of her immigrant mother and father.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group