COLA Gallery Guide: JANE BRUCKER

Accompanying the exhibition, COLA 24 [City of Los Angeles Independent Master Artist Project (COLA IMAP)] at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, a gallery guide was published for viewers. Below is an excerpt.

Interview by NANCY MEYER

2024

Tell us about yourself, where did you grow up and what brought you to LA?:

I grew up in San Diego, California in the 1960s and 1970s, but my family history there goes back to before the 20th century. My grandmother built her house in 1926 in San Diego, and until a few years ago, this house was still a gathering place for us. I came to realize that kind of family longevity and continuity of place in California is not typical.

After graduating from SDSU, I came to LA in the early 1980s, first to the eastern edge of the county to attend Claremont Graduate University for my MFA in painting and performance art. I moved to the westside in 1993 when I accepted a teaching position at Loyola Marymount University, where I still teach courses in drawing and contemplative practice.

What led you to becoming an artist?:

Growing up in Southern California during the 60s and 70s was fun but a bit insular. My dad was an educator and my parents were very supportive of my creativity. I explored pottery, drawing, and poetry writing. When I was ten, I offered art lessons to the neighborhood kids and cut up our family collection of National Geographic magazines for collages. As a teen, I liked art but was always figuring out how to spend more time on the beach or up to visit at my brother’s organic farm/off-grid homestead in Northern California.

My grandmother’s experience as a single mother living through the 1929 depression prompted her to save everything. Everything could be used again or adapted for another purpose. Matchbooks, photographs, newspaper clippings, fabric, chipped ceramic, clothing, knick-knacks and buttons. In my generation, a similar resourcefulness helped my brother to build an off-grid homestead in the 1970s while I created my own art practice a decade later.

When my grandmother passed away in 1995, I inherited her treasure trove of objects. From that point on, her collection of many small items became the reference point for all my aesthetic decisions. My performance and installation work began to feature these tiny objects alongside larger things like furniture. I saw my own history or the histories of others in them. People started giving me lots of items and sharing their memories associated with them. This was the beginning of using these materials to shape a story, or a fragment of a story to present not just the past, but the current moment. Sometimes I feel drawn to tell someone else’s story or introduce the viewer to a real person from the past whose story speaks to me.

What were/are some of your influences and what was the trajectory to performance art and an installation based practice?:

I like the idea that art is a gift. When I attended Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting in Maine in 1987, I met artist Agnes Martin. Meeting Agnes prompted me to acknowledge the relationship between the spiritual and the physical, a connection I already felt. After returning from Maine that year, my interests in spirituality led me to the Claremont School of Theology where I completed an MA in Religion and the Arts, focusing on the complicated nature of women in religion and feminist traditions.

While Agnes Martin spoke to my minimal and spiritual side, my graduate training with people like artist Connie Zehr encouraged me to think about the space of the gallery, (or even a garage or a closet) as part of the work. The spaces where I exhibit or perform dictate what I do in the work. Telling and performing stories or creating a felt sensibility through the organization of objects—categorizing, listing, stacking, and carefully placing each item—is an extremely satisfying activity. Maybe there is some element of human care and gift in that alone.

In my performance work, I carefully consider space and the audience. The work’s meaning then naturally emerges from relationships between performers and objects, space and audience. I hope to give the viewer an experience of movement, tactility, and or an activity that adds to the visual, aural, textual and physical content of the work in calm and reflective ways. Sometimes these works are solo but more often others collaborate with me. Even the viewer is sometimes asked to collaborate by inviting their participation.

Please tell us about the body of work for COLA 24. How does it relate to your interest in personal and collective histories as well as family heirlooms?:

The new work created for COLA 24 started with my grandmother’s bed frame. My brother had it stored in his barn and it was broken with parts missing since 1995. I have been thinking of it for a few years, but it seemed beyond repair. I felt a responsibility to make the bed into something for everyone living in LA. It seemed like we needed to rest and needed a place to rest. But of course, the bed is empty—because it seems like there is nowhere to find safety, calm, and peace.

I also have been deeply affected by my sister-in-law’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, so all the works in the exhibition are partly for her. My sister-in-law, Meca Wawona, was known for her environmental activism. The mirror I made for Meca is not reflective. It instead uses stained glass painting techniques to render a dense but delicate arrangement of painted redwood leaves and bright yellow of the silver nitrate stain. Here, the mirror cannot reflect the disappearing self, but it does invite the viewer to glimpse someone that I love and to consider the tragedy of losing vital souls whose work in the world is not done.

The Old Snag is the top of a redwood tree from my brother’s farm that fell this winter. Meca can no longer live at the homestead and I always saw her as a keeper of the ancient trees. The Old Snag is an ancient tree with a 10’ diameter base. A spring flowed from its hollow trunk and we drank from it. I feel like it fell over in sorrow.

Please tell us about the intersection of your practice and the concepts around mortality and the fragility of life?:

My practice with mortality and fragility comes from my own experiences of loss as a witness to death and dying. I care about the objects I use to make my work, especially if they were important to those who owned them. These things have a way of sustaining a social thread and a connection to a time, a place or persons. Telling the story or capturing a feeling quality or remembrance through materials creates longevity even as the materials themselves—like our bodies—are fragile.

The objects I use have developed a patina over time. They are meaningful to me because they authentically represent a sense of history or story. Clothing gets softer, wood and metal show signs of wear and physical damage, all caused by handling, friction, abrading, or fading. Stains, marks and scratches become markers that show the energy of living and dying.

Can you discuss the importance of adding to/revisiting certain bodies of work and how that relates to your practice overall?:

Time moves slowly, and chances are that in my lifetime, I will repeatedly explore the same ideas. My colleague Paul Harris has called my work “cumulative and incremental.” I think this is correct. Ongoing work can be adapted to new spatial opportunities, or move me deeper into the content and I never really get tired of it.

An example in COLA 24 is Bed (rest). It builds off of my series, Spiritual Furniture, the title of which was inspired by one of my theology professors, Dr. Jack Coogan. During my study, I was going through an existentially difficult time and was late turning in a paper. When I explained my situation to him, he said to me, “That is understandable Jane, you are moving a lot of spiritual furniture around.”

The series of mirrors I have been making since 1995 was not really planned. In art history, mirrors as the subject of artworks are completely void until a figure (often the viewer or the artist) enters its field of reflection. The mirrors I make reference a person (as in a portrait or self-portrait) or act as a physical tool used for a symbolic purpose (like understanding the self). Even if they encourage only a simply curious or passive gaze, it is an opportunity for the viewer to reflect.

What’s the most exciting part of your art practice?:

Collecting heirloom items from others or that come from my own family is very different from any other type of collecting. There is often a deep, sentimental value attached to objects that have been passed down from one generation to the next. Understanding who these items belonged to, or how they were used, or the possibilities for meaning they employ, helps me navigate what I need to do with them. In an ethic of care, material choices are intentional, even if intuitive. Gathering and touching these materials affects the outcome of the work. Considering the sensorial information present in these heirlooms becomes an essential part of the story my work tells.