Derek Brunen’s creative practice maps the conceptual horizons of limit systems. With tacit calm and merciless procedure, his schemata perform themselves from inception to completion in an allegorical teleology, culminating in a terminal condition: the ultimate cliché and inevitable punch-line of existential finality.
Following a philosophical flight-path inspired by Alain Badiou, Jean Luc Nancy, Gilles Deleuze, and the postmodern interpreters of Friedrich Nietzsche, Brunen recognizes himself in embodying the virtual process of becoming. An assemblage of threshold-potentials, Brunen's aesthetic tolerances iterate as simple rules which unfold into complex manifolds of form and open plateaus of meaning. This author and the artist have been debating the problematics of 'becoming real’ for going on a decade now. For fleeting moments lately, an insight dawns which suggests I may be starting to get my head around the Dak-o-lution...
Derek and I initiated a theoretical dialogue while colleagues at artschool in 1998. We later formalized alliances in the 2001 incorporation of Intermission. Working from similar theoretical sources, ranging the vector-trajectories of Fluxists and Formalists, we produced at times comparable results. However, each of intermissionary bears a radically different epistemology in the final analyses - Derek remains ever the elegant minimalist, where i lean towards the profusely maximal.... On the point of this difference in fundament, it’s challenging to pretend to represent or reconstruct Derek’s blithely fatal trajectories... Undeterred, here we are …
Dak’s early works were a seductive suite of quizzical texture-paintings, four-by-four foot square panels built up with a shallow appliqué of simple sculptural elements like tufts of feathers and fibers, lifting the surface into synthetic landscapes of pseudo-rhythmic texture and tone -- very musical works fusing color-field abstraction and assemblage. I adored them. Only a few remain uncollected. Later, his optically stunning wood panel paintings followed the hard edge of the tree’s grain, a one-to-one map of the sliced veneer peeling through arboreal growth-rings, a literal unfolding ‘truth’ seen sidelong, raw materiality of time seen side-long in cross-section... mapped over with the candy-colored binary topologies of knowledge and measurement... Successfully sublimating the simulacral impulse into a pure transcription of representation – before the image, as still remains, the substance of the event itself - a representation precedes the real, conceptual immediacy experienced is the material trace of the idea, crystallizing methodically, amorally --- addressing the filtered signature of every event considered unique, before and beyond the twists and turns of interpretive translation -- Derek applies unconventional edge-detection strategies for identifying the punctive, summary moments in transitional states…
Optically stunning and precisely crafted, and it would seem, yet to be recognized for their value in the fuller context of his milieu, these painted works stand for me some of the most densely packed and satisfying of his investigations - certainly most desirable to my collector’s eye. Brunen’s interdisciplinarity wanders with adroit proficiency in multiple media, and his meticulous attention and skill resounds throughout his practice, but I must profess I especially dig it when he paints. He knows he’s making inspirational objects for languid observation and contemplation, and his care, the dare to impress, is visible.
Derek has also produced numerous sly and poignant photographic, video, and even sound works, each of which devilishly maintain his philosophical commitment to the terminal frontier of a brutally confrontational realism. Forsaking all fantasy for a stark existential materialism, the photo and video works in his catalogue ruthlessly persist in an uncompromising allegiance with the law of ends. Case in point, his distressingly visceral, awe-inducing meat and mushroom diptych are hauntingly memorable. Having stumbled across an overturned pork-rendering truck along the Kokahala, Derek shot a suite of harrowing images belying the moribund unseen side-effects and by-products of the industrialized human organism, locked into a relentless cycle of mass-consumption which neither begins nor ends with us. In the diptych’s pairing, we are reminded that fungi, like pigs, are actually very closely related to humans; fungi in fact are more genetically similar to humans than are plants or worms or bacteria. Brunen's patch of rotting shaggy mane mushrooms reminds us that even our grotesque waste cycle brings nourishment to life elsewhere - there is no escape from the nutrient cycle. Highly successful organisms and essential mechanism of decay, mushrooms wait patiently to devour all of us post-mortem.
Drawing death to a more literal attention, and directly reassimilating anxieties around his own mortality, Brunen's ‘Plot’ series of photographs, video, and public sculptural installation, portrays in 'real time' the artist literally digging his own grave. In a continuous six hour looping video, Brunen can be seen in a cemetery shoveling out, by hand, a full-sized funeral plot – stopping repeatedly to light and smoke cigarettes – another running theme of Brunen's work.... The ironies are multifold.... Of interesting post-note, the Fraserlands cemetery has agreed to donate the plot to Derek, and consequently the city, in a remarkable gesture of cultural advocacy, has paid for an embossed capstone and designated the site a public art landmark.
Derek’s pragmatism would appear to dismiss romantic or idealistic presumptions on the boundlessness of imagination. On this we differ. But still, Derek Brunen’s widely focused creative practice ruthlessly attacks the conceptual horizon of limit systems. With tacit calm and merciless craftsmanship, his procedural schemata perform themselves from beginning to completion in a smooth allegorical progression, culminating in a beatific terminal condition: the ultimately and inevitable punch-line of mortal finality.
Brunen's sardonic analysis reads not with a sneer of pessimism but rather a provocation to the reader to seize upon a realistic affirmation of a life’s absurd potentials – an acceptance and cooperation with the corporeal laws of limitation, available to be pushed to their absolute limits … I admire Brunen’s practice, for its parodic charm, material pragmatism, and executive rigor, though I sometimes will brace against what might sound like the morbid snicker of fatalism, belying a categorical dismissal of the marvelous and imaginary, castigating the virtues of mystery and doubt. Regardless of our differences of opinion, perhaps because of them, I speculate that our continuing discussion sews new folds in the fields of exploratory potential for all dreamers in the realm.
-SC, Vancouver BC, Aug-Oct 2008
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Art by Derek Brunen
DB Online
- derekbrunen.com
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Videos by DBrunen
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