Installation view of Brian Kershisnik’s “Changing” at David Ericson Fine Art. Image by Geoff Wichert.

Most of “The Sound of Many Books” is taken up by the wall of tomes: going on five shelves of them, no two the same, the gaps between them like missing teeth that testify to regular use. This is an avid reader’s library. Who that reader may be is posed before the shelves, her back to us as though we interrupted her while seeking a particular volume, her head turned as if she’d just become aware of our presence. Or she may be listening to the titular voices, captured in the memory of reading. This is the art of Brian Kershisnik, evidence of which is visible in the stamp used repeatedly to cover her dress with ornamental leaves … the way her bobbed hair and kimono-like dress conspire to reveal her long, graceful neck … and how her nose, a feature after all that is uniquely possessed by humans, falls straight along her profile.

“The Sound of Many Books” is not the only bronze Kershisnik sculpture in Choosing, at David Ericson Fine Arts this month. There are ten, all but this one in the round, ranging from pocket-sized heads through groups in action and one half-length, singing woman. But what makes it relevant here is its formal similarity to the prints and paintings the artist usually shows. Some observers claim that Kershisnik’s art has never changed beyond his early days, but this object requires us to realize that ever since his first works, his paintings have been evolving towards greater presence in real space. Whether with layered or textured brushstrokes, or the intaglio impact of stamped patterns, he has approached, and now reached, the lively effects of bas-relief, which in Rodin’s time was regarded as the climax of sculptural art.

Brian Kershisnik, “The Sound of Many Books”

Dave Ericson arguably knows more about Brian Kershisnik than anyone else, largely due to time spent in the trenches together, where both of them strive to earn a living. “I try to sell the artist,” Ericson asserts. “Not the object.” And he remembers that Kershisnik began as a printmaker. Looking back over his breakout paintings, they were smooth, like prints, and like them virtually devoid all but the most basic illusions of depth. To paint that way was a choice that he made, not a necessity, but while it’s overstating the case to say he didn’t know how to paint then, and has taught himself in years since then, it wouldn’t be entirely unfair to say that over those years, he has gradually allowed a wider vocabulary of paint handling techniques into his stripped-down, original style.

Two examples of his recent visual complexity appear on the invitation to Choosing, one in the show, itself. “Empathy,” currently at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art, illuminates the concept by using overlapping profiles, the two heads sharing a single eye. What may well be Kershisnik’s essential technique, the overpainting of one color body on another, is here augmented through overlapping entire physiognomies, so that the shared part is seen to separate from the rest of the couple. On “Dog Choosing,” the effects are more complex. Every inch of the surface has been subjected to its own treatment, whether it’s the orange-on-black impasto of the ground, the man’s blue shirt combed to expose the black beneath in parallel lines that follow his contours, the dog’s body and the woman shirt, each shaded by outlining, or the tombstone-like marks which initially recede, then float into the sky. In his recent work, Kershisnik invokes “the difficult part” of life, which includes such choices at the dog faces here, but no less so the dilemma faced by, for example, a widowed spouse, who is encouraged to remarry and go on living, but may wonder how this will play out if there really is an afterlife.

Speaking of mortality—and there are several poignant references to death in The Difficult Part, which is now at the BYU—the most up-to-date work here may well be “With Owls,” which depicts a woman standing beneath a tree in which four of the birds are perched. Arguably the finest subject of painting is the ambiguity of life, it being so difficult to control how meaning is transferred from artist to audience in a single, fixed image. Consider “Stay,” in which a man and a dog are either separated, or connected, by that word. Anyone who truly cares for a dog knows that while the man may be commanding the dog, the animal may just as well be entreating its master not to go. Consider “Chien avec regret” (“Dog With Regret”), hanging close by, for a glimpse into the infinite canine universe. But owls, which are often taken as signifiers of wisdom, have long been associated as well with death. And a few moments spent studying the paint application and handling will reveal that instead of painting the blue sky over luminous white, Kershisnik has chosen a somber base, which the branches seem to excavate by scratching through the blue. Those visual facts, along with the heavy texture of the overall brushwork, go a long way towards illuminating the anxious, even shocked look of the woman. The difference between this and the well-lit spaces of decades past is unmistakeable.

Brian Kershisnik, “With Owls,” 20×24 in.

Even the artist’s ubiquitous spiritual confidence is mediated, his youthful certainty tempered by mature reflection. In “Forgetting What I Learned,” anxiety about a very real danger finds the subject—in a meticulously rendered blue sweater—looking fearfully over his shoulder, unaware that the angels of his better nature are not there, but above him, sharing his luminous qualities but separated by a fragile veil of delicate white consequence. Aside from the question being asked, so different from previous images of figures linking the life below to that above, there is the presence of the one heavenly figure who turns to regard the viewer, as if to ask “are you seeing this, too?” This dramatic tension is new in an artist whose early works often made it all seem so certain.

It’s not all that easy to see the changes in the art of Brian Kershisnik. To be sure, they are there for all to see, but his work tends to migrate beyond the public’s view, and so any given moment in the gallery is like looking at a river as it flows past, or a film where what we can see is only the present frame. Although he cares passionately about the visible world, he’s never been all that interested in capturing it precisely. Rather, he observes the now in search of something more lasting and even permanent. He’s like a scientist who studies nature in the moment in order to understand what is true for all time. In this he has not changed, nor would we want him to.

Brian Kershisnik: Changing, David Ericson Fine Art, Salt Lake City, through Oct. 16

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.