Cris Bruch

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)

Attention Shoppers, 1985

93 Pieces, 1985

In 1985, he made the first and most iconic of his sculptures: Attention Shoppers. It's a shopping cart sheathed in black steel, held together by rivets, full of references to formalist modernist sculpture but delivering a hard smack of social commentary about death and consumerism. What you can't tell about it at first sight is that it rolls on its wheels, and has a wok with a steel ball bearing rolling around inside it making noise. The thing is commanding (it also has S&M overtones). It's also funny, like 93 Pieces, a hammered shopping cart lying on the floor shattered, which he made that same year. They became part of a series of carts Bruch got a good deal of attention for in the late 1980s, some of which he pushed around outdoors after he got to Seattle in 1987 and began living in the derelict zone of Pioneer Square.

At that time, he made rubbings of the surfaces in the neighborhood. Like any found-object artist with a conscience, he'd use whatever was around him in his art—but he also set rules for himself, observing a rigid process that is paralleled in the later precisionist objects. He'd walk a single block and take rubbings as he went, but he wouldn't allow himself to erase, to turn back, or to start over. Each rubbing was a performance.

–Jen Graves (The Stranger)

Idle, 2007

Single-channel video with audio

00’37 clip from a 12’19 video

A video of the artist sleeping while a motorcycle's engine running in neutral provides the soundtrack to his reverie.

What Do You Want To Talk About?, 2000

What Do You Want to Talk About? dismantles the very nature of sculpture with its upper and lower halves, each precariously resting on black-painted steel outlines of a table. With respective light or dark treatments of the wood on each half, Bruch also made incisions through which light may pass. Many sculptors, mostly women, have undermined sculptural volume; Bruch has managed to do so in a way that deconstructs the origins of traditional sculpture: no mass, no volume, no support, but lots to look at and to marvel over.

– Mathew Kangas (excerpt from Art ltd. Magazine)

Department of Forensic Morphology Annex, 2004

University of Washington, Seattle, WA

The Morphology piece was inspired by the Observatory Building and the Boeing Wind Tunnel Building. Trees and bushes mediate between the scale of the sculpture and the grandeur of the new School of Law building, insuring that the sculpture is not visually overpowered.

Materials: stainless steel. 28' x 9'6" x 12'

Commissioning Agency: Washington State Arts Commission Art in Public Places Program; University of Washington

Partner: State Engineering Department; Fabrication Specialties

Mutterhulse, 2007

Mutterhulse is made from Alpolic, an industrial material typically used to sheath ubiquitous buildings – gas stations, 7-11s and the like. Bruch takes this modern material and applies old-world craftsmanship by meticulously cutting individual shingles to fabricate a sculpture reminiscent of 19th century German architecture. Mutterhulse translates to “mother husk” and is a tribute to the artist’s mother, once an intellectually strong, Teutonic woman, but now a shell of her former self due to the ravages of Alzheimer’s.

Pilgrim, 2004

Pilgrim is made from [a single 1-inch wide strip] of un-waxed milk carton paper, meticulously hand coiled to produce its acorn-like shape. Its name through tat circular process, calling to mind the rhythm of a ritual journey around a Buddhist stupa, the meditative labyrinths of Christianity, or the circumambulation of the Stations of the Cross. As an object, Pilgrim is solemn and stately, the intricacy of its inked edges reinforcing the deliberative, focused process of its making.

–Elizabeth Bryant (catalog essay)