Paedra Bramhall: Parallel Universes–Transfigured Collages
AVA Gallery and Art Center, Lebanon, NH
Through June 10, 2011
By Fran Bull
Among her many gifts, including glass artist of flamboyance and renown, Paedra Bramhall is a jazz master. Like Matisse, she spins large, generous, sassy. and soulful visual riffs, not with paper and scissors, but with the quintessential imaging tool of the twenty-first century: the computer. Paedra (who most-often uses just her first name) cajoles the mighty electronic brain, possibly the most complex machine ever conceived, into a rollicking collaboration. She plays it like Thelonius Monk on the piano and requires the behemoth to perform tortuous bends and turns in the service of her art. Behind these eyeball-titillating works on canvas is a composer and improviser with which to be reckoned.
Working with Brandon-based master printer Edward Loedding, whose expertise helped to orchestrate and midwife into being these handsome, strikingly innovative large-scale works, it is just possible Paedra has created a unique synthesis of imagery and methodology. Starting with ordinary (if sexually charged or somewhat alarming, as in the instance of a dead mouse) photographic images, then feeding them into the labyrinth of computer programs, Paedra transforms these primary sources into glowing creations unique in the world.
This is an art that is completely self-referential. To crack the code it is necessary to scrutinize the canvases long and hard—and then perhaps to abandon the project for the simpler joys of immersing oneself in sensuous color and sheer beauty. This is art that blares its forthright tunes with unbridled virtuosity–Paedra has art chops to spare—laying out compositional strategies that feel strangely familiar. These are after all, pictures that on one level celebrate pure form, limpid saturated color, dynamic pictorial composition. Each canvas is a bursting cornucopia of myriad shapes, wildly inventive patterns, motifs from every style and period—figuration, abstraction, biomorphic, and organic forms—with a palpable tension between formality and exuberance.
Paedra’s is a game of fragmentation, repetition, distortion, a game of scale, of magnification and miniaturization. Images morph and splinter into kaleidoscopic arrays. Ms. Wyld, for example, is a work in which figuration explodes across the canvas becoming, before our eyes, pattern and abstraction. Bold, hot pink lozenge-like forms (lips?) careen outward from the crotch and splayed legs of a woman like fetishes, emissaries of feminine sexuality, suggesting, with a characteristic touch of sly wit and ribald humor, we not take lightly the “womb” power of Woman.
Yet any attempt to locate this dazzling body of work within the canon of art history is ultimately discouraged. While a brighter than bright palette and certain ironic allusions suggest pop art, and certainly Ms. Wyld could be a pop-derived image, a parody of the pin-up genre of a Mel Ramos or a Vargas, there is yet a signature exotic quality that discourages such association. If there are allusions to conventional painting subjects—landscape, portrait, color field abstraction, or to the color play, flatness, and iconography of primitive or aboriginal art, Persian carpets—these are distractions and to cling to them can subvert a deeper experience of Bramhall’s achievement. In this artist’s brave new world, try as we might to categorize and to anchor our responses in the known, Paedra has other plans for us.
The piece Homage appears at first to be a riot of all-over patterning, a landscape of shards, spiky shapes, and crystalline arrangements. Closer examination raises curious questions: Are these craggy fields based upon human anatomical shapes? Is this some icy Arctic landscape? Are these quasi-cubistic forms Paedra’s quirky extraterrestrials cavorting on some distant planet? We are, thus, plunged into terra incognita, a curiously beautiful place resplendent with supernatural shapes glowing in a palette almost devoid of all darkness. We are in a land of prisms, a terrain of vertiginous depths. We are in territory encountered in dreams, or visited while under the disorienting influence of the fermented grape, the cactus, or the mushroom.
It remains for the viewer to wonder how these pictures are composed and according to what guide. In searching for possible answers, we engage in an intense exercise of scanning, of staring even, at the dazzling and hypnotic orchestrations that comprise these canvases. What treasures are concealed by the din and cacophony? We search, not without a degree of prurience, into the labyrinthine surface mappings. Apart from never really catching glimpses of the “naughty bits” —camouflaged passages promising and never delivering visions of pulsing tumescence—we are, nevertheless, led into lairs that could host a range of encounters and out-of-body trysts. As voyeurs and voyagers both, a seriously playful artist has led us on an erotic archaeological dig.
With this powerful new body of work, Paedra has laid out for the viewer a game of hide and seek, an intriguing treasure hunt. In the end, the party she has invited us to is one that celebrates the intrinsic and pure joys of looking at pictures, of being in the presence of innovative art, and artfulness, of seeing, discovering, questioning, and of risking a surprise encounter with the ineffable and the mysterious.
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Fran Bull, artist, owner of Gallery in the Field, and teacher, lives and works in Brandon, Vermont. Her art has been exhibited nationally and internationally for decades. Bull’s writing on art has appeared in Art News and other art publications.
Images: (top) Dreams & Red Blonde Hair, 60″ x 48″; transfigured collage/unique pigmented print by Paedra; (below) New World, 52″ x 63″, transfigured collage/unique pigmented print by Paedra