Emilie Brzezinski: Chainsaw Progression

EMILIE BRZEZINSKI

CHAINSAW PROGRESSION

Emilie Brzezinski

Born in 1932 in Geneva, Switzerland, Emilie Benes Brzezinski immigrated to the United States and grew up in California. She graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in Art History in 1953.

It can be said that her career as an artist began on the West Coast while taking long walks with her father and collecting driftwood, which she would then carve into little animals and figures. Brzezinski began her art career in earnest in the 1970s working with a variety of media, including resins, latex, and wood fiber. Her expressive themes always related to nature. Eventually she shifted focus to creating monumental wood sculpture, using a chainsaw and an ax to carve towering forms that breathed new life into felled trunks.

During the last two decades, Brzezinski has had several gallery and museum installations both in the United States and overseas. Many of her works are in the Czech Republic, the country of her family’s origin. There, Prague Titans gazes upon the Vltava River, and a more restrained installation, Broken Blocks can be seen in the National Gallery in Prague. In the United States, her bronze Arch in Flight stands just two blocks from the White House in front of the Federal Reserve building on New York Avenue, and her most monumental work to date, Lament, greets visitors in the front circle of the Kreeger Museum. Outside the nation’s capital, Brzezinski’s sculptures can be found in Chicago at The Society of Arts as well as in New Jersey at the respected Grounds for Sculpture.

Brzezinski continues to work in her Northern Virginia studio that she built in the 1980s.

This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with Jim Kempner Fine Art. The exhibition will be on view from March 15th to April 29th, 2018.

Lament

Lament, 2013.

Red Oak (shown on cover) Bronze (shown to the left) 14’ 7” x 3’ 8” x 3’ 7”.

13’ 1” x 4’ 2’ x 3’ 8”.

11’ 9” x 4’ x 6’.

Each of the three trunks that make up Lament has a different provenance, yet they are all from the same family, the red oak. Quercus rubra of North America, commonly called northern red oak, can live up to 500 years. This hardwood specimen is also known for its strength, its potential to reach upward, and the large open pores of its course-grained surface.

Brzezinski began Lament with a single, dramatically bent trunk of red oak. When she found the second trunk, she knew that the two belonged together, joining into a much more emphatic gesture.

She exhibited the two-part composition a few times before she stumbled upon the third trunk at a lumber yard - deemed useless and slated to be burned. That was the moment when she came up with the larger idea of “lament” and gave that title to the three-piece installation.

As with many other of her works, she describes Lament as a sculpture born from a strong, instantaneous reaction to individual trunks and the messages embedded in their forms. She refers to those reactions as the high point of creativity in the work process.

Originally shown in the sculpture garden of the Kreeger Museum (Washington, D.C.), Lament has also been cast in bronze (pictured on the left) for a long-term display at the entrance. Lament, as seen in the Kempner sculpture garden, is the original wood.

Sprites

Sprites, 2010.

Box elder.

7’ 8” x 3’ x 3’.

7’4” x 3’ x 2’5”.

Sprites exemplifies the ways in which Emilie Brzezinski’s work has evolved since the mid-1980s. Fashioned out of two pieces of box elder, this composition highlights the natural forms of the trees, as well as the unlikely beauty that can result from their imperfections.

The box elder (Acer negundo) is a maple native to North America. Unlike most other trees from that family, this particular type requires both a male and a female tree to reproduce. This light, close-grained specimen of soft wood is often invaded by ants and discolored by the forces of nature. The red stain that can appear on the surface of this tree, both as a trace of its “injury” and a mark of beauty, inspired Brzezinski.

Though she began with two individual pieces, after she completed them, she felt that their forms created a beautiful sense of interplay with one another. It was only at that point that she decided to give this composition its current name, invoking the often mischievous figures of spirits from various European folk traditions.

Cores

Cores, 2005.

Box elder.

7’ 8” x 3’ x 3’.

7’4” x 3’ x 2’5”.

The circular shapes of Cores come into being by an investigation of another natural process: the way in which the poplar tree splits into branches. This specimen (Populus), which is also native to the Northern Hemisphere, is commonly known as aspen or cottonwood tree. Light in color, soft, straight-grained and of fine texture, it is the preferred host of the gypsy moth.

Brzezinski’s intent here is to convey the atmosphere of a primeval forest, with enormous shells and cores strewn over its surface under the giant branches of its trees. The forest that, in her words, represents both eternal mystery and a haven where beauty, life, and death intermingle with one another.

Like in most of her other works, the Cores carry a myriad of traces. Warm and appealing in their texture, they also display various grains, knots, grown-over wounds, cracks and surprises from insect invasions or rot spots - recalling not so much an artist’s conscious gesture, but the shape of memory.

Totems

Sticks Arch

Totems, 1988.

Locust Tree.

7’ 8” x 3’ x 3’.

7’4” x 3’ x 2’5”.

Totems represents one of Brzezinski’s first large-scale wood sculptures. Made of the hard and durable locust tree, they are deeply carved to show the particular strength of the medium. Formally, they also highlight her fascination with the relationships between positive and negative spaces, between interiors and exteriors.

Another specific challenge she faced in this work was how to cut two locust saplings apart, and then reattach them to one another. In the process, the large metal screws she used became yet another metaphor for resilience and survival.

In addition to the chainsaw - her main instrument in most of her monumental wood sculptures - in Totems she also used the sledgehammer. As she has often noted, this seemingly aggressive approach to her medium is a response to the turbulent forces that shape trees in their natural environment.

Sticks Arch, 2017-18.

White Oak. 9’ (variable).

Like many of Brzezinski’s sculptures, Sticks Arch has its origins in a sustained consideration of the essential properties of the medium. Here the sculptor worked with white oak, the acorn-bearing genus Quercus of the beech family. Heavy, strong, extremely durable and fine-grained, this tree native to North America is often used for boat building because of its durability and resistance to rot. Its canopy can grow immensely in an open setting. In a forest, however, white oaks cannot spread outward, but push their branches up to impressive heights of 80 - 100 ft.

As Brzezinski has repeatedly observed, she is fascinated by the persistence of trees in their reach for light. When that light is obscured, they tend to bend and contort themselves in order to get the nourishment needed for survival. Describing this natural struggle, she compares trees that have had to “fight” in order to reach maturity to “dancers” or, sometimes, to “wise old beings hunched by years of striving for light, a striving imprinted all over their form.”

The powerful sense of movement arising from this strife is what drew Brzezinski to the branches of this particular oak tree. As she chiseled them down, she revealed the lines of that struggle - or “the very emotions of growth.”