Multiples Like Rabbits
By D. Eric Bookhardt
In Chris Brumfield's There Was Glory in Them Eggshells, dozens of clay rabbits appear mysteriously on a salvaged wooden staircase.
The French have a term for it. L'heure Bleue, or "the blue hour," refers to that transitional time between day and night favored by painters and photographers, when the light turns magical, people's lives shift gears, and sensations are poetically enhanced, so it's a term that can symbolize such atmospheric experiences. Although Chris Brumfield is an avid clay sculptor and gardener, his primary interest is the poetic resonance of people's lives, especially the way some people associate their memories and experiences with the things they collect, objects charged with poetic symbolism.
This may sound familiar. Certainly the best found-object artists such as Joseph Cornell were geniuses when it came to extracting poetic associations from the little orphaned objects they accumulated. But Brumfield creates his own mementoes out of clay, emphasizing their "blue hour" connotations with liberal applications of blue glaze. Rather than engaging us with traditional paintings or sculpture, Brumfield gives us installations of his own collections of handcrafted and familiar, yet mysterious, curiosities. His Blue Ward is like a medieval village of whimsical clay structures, some resembling huts or houses while others are simply whimsical, period. Look at Me is more pointed, a cluster of clay sculptures of long-barreled pistols clutched menacingly by disembodied hands. Mounted on the wall and pointed at the viewer, their cartoonish lines are as reassuring as their proportions are menacing.
Another installation, There Was Glory in Them Eggshells, features dozens of nearly identical clay rabbits arranged on a salvaged wooden staircase, where they look as uniform and orderly as the legions of terracotta soldiers found in the tomb of the ancient Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, and just as spooky. But the most Zen moment awaiting the viewer is Trade Deficit, a crab trap filled with clay Buddhas -- not the historic religious Buddha of ancient India, but rather those jolly, fat, good-luck Buddhas that turn up all over Asia and beyond. With his crab traps, clutter and homespun objects, Brumfield reveals -- and seemingly revels in -- his Louisiana origins. Here his sense that collecting is an art form in its own right melds seamlessly with his implicit view that art is a subcategory of magic, that clutter is just another way of imposing order on a notoriously disorderly world.
and here is a link to the article online
http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2007-09-04/art_rev.php
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