BRACH TILLER
Wading
Artist Reception: June 21st, 6-8 PM
June 21st - July 15th, 2023
Click HERE for checklist
Malaprops and homophones almost sound like imaginary musical instruments from an 80s synth band, but they are very real - indeed - to the artist Brach Tiller. Can a prism be your prison? Are you wading or waiting? Carry a big oar and tread lightly. Or however that saying he’s saying is meant to go. “Wading versus waiting describes the state that I have been in for the last six months of not drowning, and not swimming, but literally wading,” explains Tiller. “The feeling of having just enough to get by every month. The idea of ‘waiting’ comes into play as all the paintings visually tell my experience of waiting for things to be different. Sometimes it's the things I wait for in the day, or the actual act of waiting.” The ambiguity expressed here further animates his concept in its vagueness. Enough to get by how? Fiscally? Emotionally? Both?!
For instance, in “Caving Out”, Brach recreates his apartment as a flooded cave.
The flat he shares with his girlfriend Sam is modestly-scaled and lacking in natural light, so naturally the couple refers to the apartment as their cave. A cave where they spend every day, on the couch with their rounded corner coffee table waiting for something new, something to change. The rectangular green object is a reference to that coffee table where Sam props her feet up. The golden bars double as a prison-like structure, but an ineffective confinement as the spacing of the bars is not tight enough to keep anything in. Their apartment is not a prism, as they can come and go as they please, but the cave is a place where Sam and Brach wait for a home with a yard, on their couch at the end of a studio day.
In “Flooding the Bog”, Brach depicts the jalapeno plants they are growing from seed under a grow lamp in their same apartment. Seemingly everyday, Sam will wake up and, while Brach is watering them, asking “where are my peppers?!” The passage of time marked through the growth of plants and the literal waiting for a fruit to bear. Because the peppers are in a pot with no drainage, Brach sometimes accidentally overwaters them and so the word “bog” was introduced.
“Repeater” is visually born from seeing all the elm seeds fall this spring. They clustered heavily outside Brach’s studio and he wanted to paint that organic overcrowding. The work became an expression of repetition. They are a visual representation of his repetitive lifestyle of going to the studio and not doing much else. The elm seed UFO’s, for Brach, represent fate. The idea of doing things over and over and trying to find new solutions, new paths, while ultimately ending up in the same spot. Like wading, in a way. “I don't see it as demise,” the artist concludes, “but rather inevitability.”
“Hubbard’s Folly” is in reference to both the street on which Brach lives (Hubbard Street) and an old tower that sits on the premises of the school behind his apartment. It’s a smoke stack that reaches far above any other building around, likely from an earlier type of heating system. It is no longer functioning and therefore it has become a folly tower. Brach goes outside every morning with a cup of hot water and looks at this tower, a foolish waste of his time.