The sound of Brenda Brown's art is what
you notice first: It's the gurgle of water, cascading over a
ziggurat-like, stepped wooden form, or framed and contained by
other free-standing architectural sculptures. Brown's work is
at the Chapel Gallery, 60 Highland St., West Newton, through
Sunday. Obsessed with water, she offers a virtual aquatic
autobiography, ranging from a drawing from a bird's eye view of
the Boston University swimming pool to tiny, quiet pools of
bronze, concrete or iron, which shape the water within.
Throughout her work there is a tension between the geometric
orderliness of the sculptures, made of hard materials, and the
wayward freedom and shapelessness of the water. In the
most interesting works - the large ones in which the water
travels instead of lying still, the tension operates in a
suspenseful balance.
Christine Temin, The Boston Globe, April
24, 1986
Late summer is not the best time to visit
Washington's galleries. Many are closed; lackluster group shows
prevail in those that are open. On view through Sept. 9, Water Instruments; a
show of bronze sculptures by Brenda
Brown at Henri Gallery (1500 21st St. NW),
is an exception that proves the rule. Water is the theme and
inspiration for all of the works in this modest yet credible
showing, the artist's first in Washington. Subtly textured
bronze containers and fountains cast in simple, elemental
configurations evoke ancient measuring and hydraulic devices.
The works explore perennial concerns and contrasts -
life/death, motion, stagnation, the passage of time, the lure
of infinity.
The show's instrument theme is most
clearly evident in "Klepsydra," the artist's version
of an ancient time-measuring device. Operating on the same
principle as an hourglass, the klepsydra consists
of two primitive bronze "buckets" suspended by
chains from a wooden frame. Water drips through a small opening
in the upper container into the lower one, marking time's
passage. The show's most engaging piece, "Squared
Circle;' is a simple fountain consisting of a circular disk set
in a bronze box. Here water is life, burbling below the
mandalic circle, trickling over and dripping through its
punched-out pattern of radiating leaves suggestive of
vegetation. Here, as in the smaller "Bucket and Wheel
Fountain;' a cylindrical container that spews water from a
spoked inset, the forms used are familiar rather than invented.
The artist exerts her sensibility through texture, patina and
proportion.
It falters some in "Water
Comb-Glimpses of Glistening," an inverted cast-aluminum
cone filled with water and mounted on a tripod. Like
spiderwebs, nylon threads strung with tiny colored beads
crisscross the cone's interior,
luring the eye into its stagnant depths.
But the beads seem a fussy, too precious touch against the
organic assertiveness of the container; moreover, this work and
others in which the water stands rather than flows would be
greatly enhanced by an outdoor setting. There they might be
periodically refreshed by rainwater, integrated into the ebb
and flow of nature which serves as the artist's starting point.
Alice Thorsen, The Washington Times, September
3, 1987
