{"id":328,"date":"2009-02-04T11:43:57","date_gmt":"2009-02-04T17:43:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15bytes12\/2009\/02\/04\/sandy-brunvand-take-two\/"},"modified":"2023-11-04T14:39:20","modified_gmt":"2023-11-04T20:39:20","slug":"sandy-brunvand-take-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/sandy-brunvand-take-two\/","title":{"rendered":"Sandy Brunvand Take Two"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nWhen we say an artist puts her life into her art, we usually mean that important events become significant subject matter. But for\u00a0Sandy Brunvand<\/a>, the process is both subtler and more pervasive. Hearing her unravel the origins of her paintings and prints, whether in exceptionally accessible written statements or in her spontaneous and acute conversation, two things quickly become apparent: from the beginning, a fundamental curiosity about the workings of the world that would do credit to a scientist or a philosopher has informed her work, and she never rests. Instead, each new discovery or understanding, whether found in nature or in her studio technique, spurs further research and new imagery. The result is like that mythical boat that over time saw every single plank and fastener wear out and be replaced, yet while totally changed was still thought by its crew to be the same vessel. The Sandy Brunvand (she pronounces the U like “brew” rather than “brush”) whose art is on exhibit this month at Park City’s\u00a0Kimball Art Center<\/a>\u00a0differs in every salient detail from the person who entered art school over twenty years ago, but those two figures are sequential expressions of a driving energy instantly recognizable by anyone who has been fortunate enough to feel its touch.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Sandy Brunvand’s enfolding and unfolding view of everything begins with a most essential duality: life and death. We can follow the evolution of this point of view if we imagine the trek she takes every day, leaving behind cement sidewalks in favor of the trails that wind into the hills surrounding her northeast Salt Lake home. Deep geologic facts are visible here, but so is the disruption living things work on them, making marks in ways analogous to her studio process. The small plants that, enlarged by close observation, become frequent subjects of her art\u00a0|1|<\/b>\u00a0express their genetic code, but they also carry that code in seeds they always contain. Equally visible is the dissolution of living things after death. The reciprocating passage of matter through self-propelling life and back to mortal inertia becomes in her vision analogous to the binary code: the sequence of ones and zeros, of presence and absence, that forms the bedrock of our contemporary understanding of reality. So those numbers, stark patterns of straight lines and circles, frequently flow through her works. In keeping with their natures, sometimes they are visible, but other times they are covered by subsequent marking so that only the artist knows they are there.<\/p>\n

Duality is always present in Brunvand’s works, sometimes obviously, as in the frequent diptychs, and at other times more subtly, as when she combines an organic subject with a grid. Pairs can occur side by side\u2014again, the diptychs, which can be horizontally or vertically arrayed\u2014or can be layered one upon the other, like geological strata, as in paintings with inset wax vaults or her more recent Chine Coll\u00e9 prints. The best way to appreciate the originality of her use of multiplication of images and techniques may be by recalling the discovery of mathematical perspective. Refusing to accept that a two dimensional surface required a monocular vision\u2014that it could only represent objects existing outside space, like saints and angels\u2014Renaissance painters gradually learned how to present objects in apparent space, as though being seen stereoscopically, when in fact there was only one image. If that’s true for what is looked at, Brunvand as much as asks, why not equally for what is perceived? And so her work urges us, when looking at one thing, so see it in context with something else: life in the presence of death, the organic surrounded by the abstract, a unique instance in the context of infinite iteration. She’s not trying to reconcile them; in her cosmology death ends life. But she wants us to see alternates, the way contrasting colors cause us to see each more vividly.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Brunvand’s visual polyphony finds an echoing pattern of doubling in her life. At 18 she left Michigan to come to Utah for the outdoor life, making her one Utah artist who couldn’t count on family history or cultural roots to connect to her audience. While many artists struggle to avoid an academic role, she enjoys teaching. And although she always knew she would be an artist, painting was not her first medium. Instead, like many of her peers in the 70s and 80s, she bought into the notion that material-based arts, which had previously been relegated to the status of crafts, were about to take a place besides painting and sculpture. She earned her BFA in 1989 in ceramics, a medium demanding hard physical work that she stuck with for a dozen years, until she developed degenerative arthritis in her thumbs: a condition that derailed not only her career in clay but her avocation as a mandolin-playing musician. In fact, it threatened her on a far deeper level; since it is the opposable thumb that makes us human, she explains, and it was her thumbs that were most affected, she felt threatened by the loss of her very humanity.<\/p>\n

Faced with the inescapable premonition that, as she calmly\u2013but\u2013chillingly puts it, she had only a finite number of effective motions left in her hands, she realized they would be used up more quickly in the obdurate medium of clay. More importantly, she had to open her mind to the growing realization that she would not reach her artistic goal in clay in any event. Although she remains “humble before materials,” and still describes her core technique as “putting materials together and letting them sing,” and hardly anything leaves her studio that doesn’t involve collaging disparate media, Brunvand finally accepted that not all materials are equally eloquent on the conceptual level. Many an artist that far into a career has quit at that point. But Brunvand thought about her subjects, those plants so “strong in their struggle to survive,” and realized there was something there that needed to be “adequately served by what I do.” Deciding to start over, in 2001 she went back to school.<\/p>\n

Judging from her MFA show two years later, her efforts to compress her art into two dimensions were rewarded with rapid progress. The binary code, expressive of presence and absence, appears almost immediately and proves to be a powerful aesthetic device, capable of forming contrast, balance, and visual drama in addition to its symbolic capacity. Still at heart a musician, though severely restricted in performance, she transposed the traditional hymn “I’ll fly away” into binary code and it became, in fragmentary form, a key element in her work. The botanical elements\u2014seed pods and desiccated plant forms like leaves reduced to a fine net of empty veins\u2014also appear. And there is a third theme: her dog, named Zobel, who will eventually be replaced by another named Scruggs. She begins every working day with a session of blind-contour drawing of this companion, the point man on her daily encounters with nature. These drawings, often of paws, are collaged into numerous works.\u00a0Eventually, when she tires of picking his hairs out of her work, she will deliberately include them as an additional linear element.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n