Volume 13, Issue 52
Published April 19th, 2006
SAND AND WATER
April 14th, 2006 - May 12th, 2006
Exit (a gallery space)
123 South Water Street, Suite 7, Kent
330-321-8161
Brenda Stumpf's voyages in Egypt
FUNERARY BOAT Brenda Stumpf makes use of the discarded, torn and found.
No doubt every work of art is a journey, but few travel as far as Brenda Stumpf's sculptures and collages, currently on display at Exit (a gallery space) in a show titled Sand and Water. Stumpf's intuitive foraging into the deeps of history and the darkling realms of the unconscious produces a sampling of strange visions. Alluding to journeys of the soul in ancient Egyptian ritual, her elegantly severe constructions read like quick dispatches from another dimension, postcards from the Ba, or soul.
Over the past few years Stumpf has become known to an ever-widening arts audience as a high priestess of, well, junk. "Found objects," if you like, but certainly stuff from the tree lawn, or caught at the foot of chain link fences, or found among dust bunnies at the back of a bottom drawer ” the debris of marginal spaces where common usage ends, blending into myth.
Stumpf has made it her business to reconstruct the dim outlines of such dispossessed kingdoms, focusing X-ray-like attention on a faint pulse she finds in the shadows. In her hands discarded bits of lumber, torn paper or a row of scapulae from an old piano ” hammers and bits of felt lined up like sinister toy soldiers” begin a new life. Stumpf's is not a colorful world, glimpsed as it must be in twilight, like the world of faerie; her dominant shade is most often sepia, derived from the tannin in tea bags.
But in Sand and Water Stumpf's crepuscule has been transformed into the mirages and half-blind shimmer of a desert noon. The 13 two- and three-dimensional works on view each describe part of an ancient world, a story some 3,500 years old, about a female pharaoh and her journeys on the Nile.
Stumpf's collages are made from small pieces of torn paper, layered like tiers of stone in an ancient wall or pyramid. The largest of these works, titled She (Nu and Naunet) is roughly 50 inches high and is mostly filled with small, square pieces of black construction paper, made a milky gray by repeated doses of chalk and gel medium. It looks like the wall of a temple, surrounded and bleached by infinite, endless light. But in fact the word she means pool, while nu and naumet are words signifying the primordial watery abyss. This conflation of stone and water, of cyclopean masonry and the long regular whisper and slap of the waves, is startling, like a stone tossed into the mind.
A smaller work titled Benben consists of more irregularly shaped paper shards, stained slightly with tannin but so pale the eye only gradually registers the shape they describe. Benben is a figure in ancient Egyptian lore, a tumulus-like hillock symbolizing rebirth. A pregnancy of earth, benben was the foundation of every pyramid, inspired by the long humps of silt appearing every year as the flood waters of the Nile receded.
Stumpf's crooked paper tor is barely visible; chunks of pale, bright sky hang over it like the feathers of a phoenix. Words are scrawled, illegible, near the crest” perhaps not a name, but the fragment of a sentence now lost, spoken by a god who also was once a little girl.
Long before the Greeks fought before Ilium, Hatshepsut was an unlikely, accidental pharaoh of the 15th dynasty. Sandwiched between murderous Thutmoses (one was her father, another her half brother and husband, a third her nephew), Hatshepsut's nearly 20-year reign was a time of relative peace and prosperity. She was in fact the sole true female pharaoh.
Among the monuments of her reign was a red obelisk inscribed with accounts of the pharaoh's exploits, later deliberately hidden under a sheath of stone. Stumpf's four-and-a-half-foot-tall Wabet remembers that act of historic repression, but as a complex reverie, dreaming of flesh and fabric and birth. Rising from the floor, Wabet's widest point is just over a foot across, at the base. There the brocade wrap, muffled beneath layers of grayish metallic paint, peels open to reveal small packets, egg-like bundles swaddled in copper-colored fabric mesh. The word means "place of embalming" and Stumpf's primary allusion is to the displacement of bodily organs during the ritual process of mummification. But as usual, there is much more.
It is like a great seed pod, or like a taboo dream of motherhood. Stumpf very often walks a thin line, finding metaphors that at once evoke spiritual purification and pollution. At its best her art inspires an intimation of subtle, ancient danger” mixed with the fresher scents of breeze and bloom. Perhaps her greatest strength is a willingness to follow an intricate path of visual logic wherever it may go, patiently accompanying each of her objects as it grows from rough initial materials and partial metaphors, gradually reaching for an ever-greater context.