THE RE-INVENTION OF MEMORY

BY SCARLET CHENG

The past is another country, to which we repeatedly try to return. In that country we left behind vivid moments etched into our subconscious, often shaped by those we have loved. We return to that country through old objects and keepsakes, through pictures and photographs–these are the archaeological remains of another day–and through memory. 

Jane Brucker sifts through the layers of her own past, finding and retrieving things that have been left behind by her parents and grandparents, as well as the dearly departed of others. She incorporates them into her artwork, both as a way to remember and to honor the past. In re-working and re-framing these objects, she also suggests our own reconstruction and reconfiguration of memory.

Take the recombination of her grandmother’s lipstick cases with kitchen tools (on view in the Kitty Rosenbaum Gallery). One metallic case is jammed onto the handle of a cork puller, another sutured to a wooden bar. The ends of the shiny lipstick cases retain their original jewelry-like finial, which makes the contrast between the two halves even more dramatic. These are two realms of the feminine–the glamorous collides with the grind of daily routine, the decorative with the utilitarian. 

In the Memorial Project, the artist features fragments of clothing–perhaps our most intimate possessions–both from those she has known, as well as from strangers. The series began shortly after the death of her father in 1999. Brucker and her mother were looking through his clothing, and found it too difficult to part with them, so she had an idea. The artist took several shirts back to her studio, then selected sections which she framed on canvas stretchers. Later, her mother's friends asked if she could do the same for them–for clothing left behind by their departed ones. Thus, an art project was born, and Brucker eventually created over 300 framed pieces, which occupy an entire room in this exhibition.

Her newest project, Fragile Thoughts, grew out of research into an important historical figure, Elizabeth Milbank Anderson, a philanthropist who worked to improve the health and education for women and girls at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. It also happens that the Long Beach Museum of Art is housed in Anderson’s West Coast beach home, built in 1912. In the installation, seven vintage chairs–two of them which actually belonged to Brucker’s grandparents–are arranged in a circle, as if having a conversation with one another. 

With a project grant from the Pasadena Art Alliance, Brucker took the opportunity to work with Judson Studios, famous for making art glass for over a century. Each chair incorporates a custom-made glass element referencing Anderson and her work. The backs of her grandparents’ chairs, for example, are now pieces of hand-painted glass, depicting the image of two girls, one on each piece, who were beneficiaries of Milbank Public Baths—established by Anderson to provide public bathing facilities to those living in crowded and impoverished New York tenements. 

 To me Brucker’s work is graced with a certain Victorian sensibility—it was an era in which sentimentality was valorized, and mementoes of the dearly departed filled the house. These days we are so anxious to welcome the future that we quickly discard the past, but Brucker reminds us how important it is to remember and to cherish that past. At the same time, the work nudges us towards re-examination. For in truth we cannot return to the past, we may be able to travel through it in our minds, and in revisiting, reclaim some part of it that eluded us then.

SCARLET CHENG is an LA-based educator and arts writer. Cheng wrote about Brucker’s 25-year survey exhibition, Fragile Thoughts, at the Long Beach Museum of Art in 2018.