Kevin Brady: Site Plans

One day I came to work to find that part of a city block had been demolished. Hills of dirt were trucked away and plywood forms appeared. Foundations took shape, walls arose, and a new building began to emerge. Space, everyone's space, was being reconfigured. The event of building reveals the essential plasticity of space: the way we divide it up, build structures into it, and sweep it clean again. Building and growth, demolition and decay are strangely commingled. Architecture, that most enduring of cultural forms, is reassigned to natural processes. You may try to expel nature with a pitchfork, said Horace, but it will come back running.

Like a building site, collage, for me, is exhilarating. It encourages swift, decisive modifications; it is constructive and destructive almost simultaneously. Structures come into being, and turn away from what they had been. Disparate spaces are sampled, juxtaposed, and reconfigured. Unlike working from plans, collage is open and improvisatory. It establishes a site for the reception of unforeseen changes. It invites and responds to the unplanned.

As an artist, I try to situate myself at the center of form- and meaning-complexes that seem most capable of producing these sorts of symbols: landscape, excavation, foundation, house, room, annex, well. A true symbol, C.G. Jung tells us, is inexhaustible; it is a living, regenerative thing. The generative activity of the studio is vital in this regard: the rhythmic, almost ritual process of collage, the surprise discoveries that occur when unlike pieces meet and mate. I seek a poetics of construction. I do so through an interplay of geometric structure and expressive abstraction, a syntax of interruption and relocation, and a language of color interaction and boundaries.

Like art itself, collage is a layered, cumulative thing, a site at which the boundary between cultural achievement and natural occurrence is sometimes, mysteriously, dissolved.

Kevin Brady, January 2006

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