WINTER WHEAT

BY IRINA D. COSTACHE, Ph.D.

“The days are all the same it’s the hours that are different…”

— Jose Saramago

The exhibition Winter Wheat includes the art of two important contemporary Los Angeles artists: Jane Brucker and Barbara Drucker. Even though conceived and created independently, a subtle, yet powerful common thread establishes a significant dialogue between their works. Both artists are concerned with the intricate dimensions of time. Their visual and conceptual narratives in this exhibition reflect on prolonged, cumulative, and unpredictable processes in which feelings, things, and occurrences collide and are fused into one.

For Brucker and Drucker memories are as much signs of spiritual connections with past existences as they are sole validations of present meanings. Each artist uses idiosyncratic and imaginative artistic practices to transform ordinary objects and inert materials into unique and significant symbols. Viewers are quickly seduced by the quiet passion of fragments, hints, and clues denoting the irreversible trajectory from genesis to finis. The thoughtful melancholy and sense of unknown permeating the art is heightened by the title of the show. Winter Wheat is a sophisticated metaphor of simultaneous anticipation and recollection of a journey that is paradoxically both recurrent and new. Neither artist, however, envisions the measured transitions from dormant state to climatic bloom and then expected denouement as isolated events or facile melodramas. Rather, Jane Brucker and Barbara Drucker create in Winter Wheat an enchanted meditative state of philosophical duration and physical performativity that needs to be instantly enjoyed and eternally preserved.

IRINA D. COSTACHE, Ph.D. writes on contemporary art and is a Professor of Art History at California State University, Channel Islands. Costache wrote about Jane Brucker in conjunction with the exhibition, Winter Wheat, at LAContemporary.