Perfect Landscape, 2007
In the weeks leading up to his retrospective, Cris Bruch was working on Perfect Landscape in his northeast Seattle studio, meticulously piecing together the wedges of plywood that form the gigantic horizontal disc. The piece is smeared with red resin; crusty where it is sanded down, glossy as strawberry jelly where it is not. The piece is not perfect, riddled with tiny accumulated mistakes that don’t self-correct, he says, but it’s the trial and error, the corrected, revised, fudged, improvised passages, that lend the sculpture its beauty, and its humanity.
Bruch’s art is one of process: patterns of making that, repeated, create a reality. The work is at once deeply personal and elegantly formal; the web of associations embodied in the materials, the process, and the form of each piece are political, social or philosophic in turn, but always remain art. It is important, he says, that there is nothing in the sculpture that does not need to be there, that the space that the work takes up is justified by its own presence. He tries on different additions to the disc, and removes them. The making is its own form of thinking, form clarifying meaning.
Bruch has been thinking of origins. At fifty, after twenty years as a sculptor in Seattle, he is looking back: at his childhood in Independence, Missouri; at the sub-division built by his high-school coach father in an old horse pasture; at his brilliant, academic, organist mother, now a hull of her formidable self. He is thinking about suburban planning and architecture, and about the curvature of time and space, about what it means to think of experience as curved. He is thinking through the making of Perfect Landscape. It begins with the idea of the sub-division, the perfect, inhuman landscape. It evolves to a kind of curved universe of space and time, pulling down to the dark hole at its center, its navel, the omphalos; to the origins of all life, of his own life; to the circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere; to this reality formed by a repeated process; to his mother; to this beautiful, useless object that must formally justify its own presence in space.
–Elizabeth Bryant (catalog essay)