HEATHER BRAMMEIER: MAYBE NEVER
Fragment: To break up or apart
Fragmentation: To disintegrate; collapse, or breakdown of norms of thought, behavior, or social relationship.
(Curator for exhibition at Hyde Park Art Center)
Maybe Never is a meditation on the beautiful and complex tension that exists between possibility and hopes that remain unfulfilled. The geometric landscape of artist Heather Brammeier’s solo exhibition Maybe Never creates a moment to reflect on decentralization and a network of possibility. Entering the walkway, polygonal structures snake up the walls. Like coded maps, the mind wanders into a contemplation on edges, asymmetrical planes, and the space in-between. Each form is dynamic, existing both independently and as part of the larger installation. What does it mean to view the world through a perspective of fragmentation? Does it disrupt the belief that anything can be whole? Or rather, is it a recognition that the whole is always made up of parts, whether visible or not? These are some of the recurring questions that animate her work.
Brammeier is guided by the interplay of shapes and space. She surrenders to the process, embracing a fragmentary perspective that acknowledges that the final pieces cannot be predicted. In Maybe Never, Brammeier incorporates triangles into wooden structures that stretch throughout the galleries. At some points they rise as high as eleven feet, exceeding where the eye can see and signaling both aspiration, and what is out of reach.
Photo Credit: Tom Van Eynde
This is Heather Brammeier’s first solo exhibition in Chicago and connects to her larger body of work that addresses the potential of play. For Brammeier, play gestures towards an openness to curiosity, loosening the reins of self-regulation. What is lost when the desire to play is left in the domain of the child, and what is re-discovered through returning to experimentation in adulthood? As a sculptor, painter and installation artist, Brammeier employs all three of these mediums into the exhibition.
The lights that illuminate the galleries and enter the window sculptures create shadows that extend the geometric figures. Brammeier understands the shadows as an element of the visual sphere that are often overlooked because they are thought to obscure what is meant to be seen. Perhaps obscurity can be approached as a realm of imaginative possibility, one that does not demand answers or certainty. Brammeier blends the colors of the gallery into the sculptures to challenge how we percieve space, blurring the boundaries between the sharp lines created by the wooden frames on the neon green floors and deep blue walls.
Visitors can move through the windows the structures create, encouraging the body to bend and stretch. Brammeier’s work dispels the notion that one must simply look and not interact with art. This invitation to move with the installation can be an opportunity to release bodily tensions when afforded the freedom to play. It may also involve grappling with the role of touch, a mode of connection that is increasingly fraught in this ongoing pandemic
Photo Credit: Tom Van Eynde
COVID-19 has altered so many conceptions of space, perhaps forever, as we are forced to re-examine physical boundaries. This ongoing period of spatial interrogation is long overdue, a reckoning that reflects on experiences of relationality, how we exist with each other in critical ways. In Maybe Never, indulge your desire for tactility and engage with the installation’s physicality as your eyes trace along angular planes. Interacting with the sculptures can highlight both the potential and limits of the body, activating the range of spatial perception we each possess.