{"id":19059,"date":"2005-09-03T17:14:16","date_gmt":"2005-09-03T23:14:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=19059"},"modified":"2020-04-04T19:12:34","modified_gmt":"2020-04-05T01:12:34","slug":"brian-christensen-at-the-cuac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/brian-christensen-at-the-cuac\/","title":{"rendered":"Brian Christensen at the CUAC"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

“Accusation”<\/p><\/div>\n

Some sculptors treat language as just another malleable substance, no different from wax or bronze. BYU Sculpture Professor Brian Christensen has chosen to call the dozen new works on display at the Central Utah Art Center<\/a> Body and Time<\/i>. Here \u201cand\u201d stands in for a word we lack: a double-ended preposition, meaning \u201cin\u201d but paradoxically navigable in both directions. Just as his technique is to simultaneously proffer and undermine the identities assumed of each of his materials, so his title means to be \u201ctime in the body\u201d and \u201cthe body in time,\u201d both sentences to be read simultaneously.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

“Pater”<\/p><\/div>\n

Start again. Brian Christensen, a youthful but no-longer-young sculptor, who lost both his parents in the past year, has assembled a dozen works that simultaneously investigate and overlay human biography with the history of his art. Using found metal, wood, and plastic objects, bronze and plastic cast from sculpted wax, and relying universally on assemblage, he\u2019s created a collection of intimately scaled works full of legible ideas wrapped in materials that please the eye and tempt touching. His title, Body and Time<\/i>, is redundant the way a pun is: two identities in one thing, like the way an art object becomes both the substance it\u2019s made of and the thing it represents.<\/p>\n

Think of the way sculptors use the word \u201cbody\u201d in reference to clay. A clay \u201cbody\u201d isn\u2019t a figure; it\u2019s the material\u2019s character. Then again, sculptors are traditionally more interested in timelessness, in presenting what is permanent in the otherwise ephemeral. Time, like transparency, challenges the sculptor; it\u2019s something sculpture doesn\u2019t do well. To link the body with time in this way invokes Sartre\u2019s great pair: Being and Nothingness.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

“Leche”<\/p><\/div>\n

Nothingness has something to do with it. In addition to meditating on the evidence, visible in his aging self-portraits, implicating him in his own eventual extinction, Christensen has set himself the task of finding a visual language in which to commemorate the passing of his parents. The two works that do this most directly span most of sculpture\u2019s history, from academic bronze to post-modern resin. \u201cPater\u201d \u2014 Latin for father \u2014\u00a0perches the ravaged face and thinning hair of an old man horizontally upon the sill of an otherwise empty window, cut through a blank, featureless wall. One thinks of Janus, the two-faced Roman god of portals, after whom January, when one year passes into the next, is named. But when we walk around to the other side, the back of this head is fractured away. There will be no more years. Here is past without future, underscored by the passive way the head lies on its side, or the delicacy with which Christensen renders the parchment skin of age. \u201cLeche,\u201d |3|<\/b>on the other hand, traces the gift of life to its source. Resembling a giant candle, with the artist\u2019s bust in place of a wick, its drip-covered, cylindrical waxen body holds in its hollow top not molten wax, but a pool of milk, from which the equally white head emerges. Milk has become a resonant sculptural material, and as Christensen\u2019s head seems to rise, dripping, from the contents of the pipe-like vessel, it comes to mind that all milk is \u201cmother\u2019s milk.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course the Postmodernist Christensen is free to mine the academic force of his art\u2019s past without accepting its contemporary powerlessness. Potential energy and even motion are common in today\u2019s sculpture, and none of these works is static. “Crucible”\u00a0presents a still life, its three parts caught balanced at the last moment before they tumble off the pedestal. “Blunt Instrument”\u00a0invites viewers to take it down from the hook where it hangs and heft it. “Deep Sea\u2019s”\u00a0long strip of corrugated glass mimics the translucent optics of water, but when the breeze from a passer-by sets it in motion like a pendulum, the sea becomes palpably present. Passing time is present in several ways in “Macaroni.”\u00a0The found objects \u2014 clamps, gears, saw blades, machine housings, and scraps from the foundry floor \u2014 speak about their individual pasts, while their assembled sphere makes the piece\u2019s surface a vortex of texture that the eye cannot hold still. Beneath their cosmic dance, graphite spheres emerging from a salvaged steel elbow carry industrial allusions over the line into biomorphic reference.<\/p>\n