Cris Bruch at Fuel - Seattle, Washington - Review of Exhibitions

You could diocese it through the gallery's forehead window: a strange-looking mass of elliptical shapes and tumescent towers, all made from what present the appearanceed to be equally spaced horizontal black lines suspended in air. Indeed, the faculty of perception was of something pneumatic, because the lines appeared to circumscribe invisible volumes

The humorous nevertheless cautionary title of Cris Bruch's installation statuary Don't Feed It, suggested that somehow or other the thing was alive and potentially threatening, like the carnivorous plant in Little store of Horrors. It also refer toed a conflation of the organic (forms that present the appearance capable of growth or transmutation) and the inorganic (the enameled-steel banding tape held in various configurations by the agency of industrial clips).

In any case, individual was engulfed by the work. The installation consisted of major composings resembling chimneys, DNA matrices, cyclone and other axial forms, each defined by the agency of the rings of steel tape and each joined to the others by means of low, undulating bands linking the bottoms. Don't Fe It was actually made up of voids more than substance. What gave the work its visual coherency and logic was the consistently spaced parallel banding, rather like isonbaric contours.

I was reminded of Marcel Duchamp's explanation for the Nine Malic Mold The mold was the wrapper inside which the two-dimensional uniformed male profile was rotated, engaging a stepping up from two- to three-dimensional form to a fourth dimension in time. Likewise, single might imagine unseen shapes rotating inside the banded contours of this installation. Thus it was a kind of diagram for motion, not the thing in motion itself.

A different perspective upon Bruch's work focuses on its systemic approach and proces orientation. The forms were generated by dint of repetition and variation. The material was held in coiled or serpentine tension. A considerable amount of simple repetition activity was expended on the piece that was one as well as the other cumulative and consequential. The forms were generated through the activity and the combination of parts to form a whole not envisioned beforehand. But this perspective doesn't explain the loopy (pun intended), almost gregarious feeling this installation elicited. You wanted to hit it, wrap yourself in it, give way to its sensuous, provocative curvature. Maybe flat feed it.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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