HOW TO LOOK IN THE MIRROR: REFLECTIONS ON JANE BRUCKER

This essay was featured in the COLA 24 exhibition catalogue at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery.

BY CLAUDIA BOHN-SPECTOR

2024

“… when the heartstrings, which contentment has silenced, like a harp laid by, yearn to be plucked and sounded again by some hand, however rough, even if it should break them.”

—Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

Jane Brucker’s delicate installations require a cautious and tender approach. One critic compared the experience of looking at her art to sitting in a glass chair–a seat that might shatter under the weight of its own symbolic significance. Fashioned from hand cast metals, carved wood and glass combined with personal belongings and objects others have left behind–clothes, furniture, tools and jewelry–Brucker’s artworks are quiet mementos to lost time, reconceived for intimate contemplation in the here and now. They invoke the shadows of things past, reminding us that lives and identities are built on shifting ground in a constantly changing world.

Brucker is often drawn to objects and stories from her family, her own personal history, or past events, as seen in images of her past work pictured here. She feels responsible for the fleeting narratives and emotions they contain. She says, “I feel they talk and plead with me to be recognized and remembered. In a kind of reverse pull, the past ultimately moves me to create a work that wholly occupies the present. Portraying them does not make me feel nostalgic towards a way of life or a time that no longer exists. It helps me to make a deep connection that is also contemplative.”

In her COLA installation, Brucker introduces us to family loss, with particular focus on her sister-in-law, the environmental activist and homesteader Meca Wawona. In a 1975 photograph, we see the determined young woman encircled by nature, her slender frame outlined against an illegally logged old-growth Redwood tree. Her rightful indignation at the loss is palpable. Today, Wawona suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, and no longer remembers her lifelong efforts as a founder of the California Conservation Corps. To honor her legacy, Brucker created “A Hand Mirror for Meca.” It is set in an ornamental cast metal frame and placed near the trunk of a fallen Redwood tree from Wawona’s Northern California ranch. Woodpeckers perforated the tree's bark with holes, signaling life after death.

In lieu of a mirror, Brucker uses stained-glass panes with delicate paintings of redwood leaves, defying our expectation to see our own likeness. Instead, the feathery foliage evokes a pristine space beyond, a Garden of Eden or paradise lost, stand-ins for the gentle reflection of a woman, now vanishing, who spent her life in ancient forests.

“Bed (rest)” nearby, made from Brucker’s grandmother’s maple bed with panels depicting California native plants, offers a temporary respite from the ravages of ill-health. A third work, “Family Tree,” blends a small lemon tree lost to construction in Brucker’s backyard with family heirlooms and clusters of glass or porcelain flowers and leaves. These carefully crafted objects offer comfort in the presence of loss and struggle, spiritual backbones in times of great vulnerability.

Throughout Jane Brucker’s 40-year oeuvre, mirrors recur as opportunities for self-seeing, showing us who we are, how we think about ourselves, our presence and inevitable absence.  Brucker notes of her process that “in the internal world where my art begins–I consider an object. The object has physical properties–small wood-handled tools, photographs, colored threads and embroidered linens, domestic or personal objects, lipstick tubes, old letters, chairs, beds and books. The inherited and used items are all very symbolic and powerful for me.”

In “Hand Mirror for Meca,” we encounter ourselves obliquely, refracted in “that translucent alabaster of our memories,” as Marcel Proust had called it. Under Brucker’s soft and ephemeral touch, Meca’s mirror is transformed from an object of vanity into a spiritual tool, offering the subject glimpses of her essential self, enveloped by nature’s gentle veil. As viewers we are invited to witness the slow disappearance of someone who now lives in a realm where dreams and imaginings provide new anchors for her existence. The experience reminds us of our own transience within a surreally calm flux of time and space.