EVA BRANDL, "The Valse Suite (another parcel of time)," March 20 to May 12, 2008, Yukon Arts Centre Gallery, Whitehorse

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"Valse (les trous du ciel)"

Eva Brandl, "Valse (les trous du ciel)," 2000, exhibition detail, ice flowers – laser-cut aluminum disks. Installation photo: Yukon Arts Centre.

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"Valse (les trous du ciel)"

Eva Brandl, "Valse (les trous du ciel)," 2000, perforated brushed aluminum, printed cloth, digital prints on fibre paper. Installation photo: Yukon Arts Centre.

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"Valse (les trous du ciel)"

Eva Brandl, "Valse (les trous du ciel)," 2000, perforated brushed aluminum, printed cloth, digital prints on fibre paper. Installation photo: Yukon Arts Centre.

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EVA BRANDL, The Valse Suite (another parcel of time)

Yukon Arts Centre Gallery, Whitehorse

March 20 to May 12, 2008

By Nicole Bauberger

In Eva Brandl’s Valse Suite, the viewer walks into space. Most of the installation’s pieces have gaps, holes, or pieces cut away, and conceptually it leaves space to wonder in. Brandl, born in Germany in 1951, lives and works in Montreal within an installation-based, European, minimalist aesthetic. For this Whitehorse show, she combines the work with Still points (of the turning world) from 2005.

The Valse Suite, created in 2000, has three parts.Valse (les trous du ciel) sits in the middle of the floor like a gallery bench. A constellation of perfect circles perforates the oval aluminum. The viewer looks up at adjacent aluminum circles on the wall, pierced with snowflake shapes. Are the holes stars or snowflakes? Did the stars fall out of the sky? In English the title reads Waltz (holes in the sky). The table wears a skirt of floral printed fabric, seemingly old and delicate. It overlaps and joins with material that appears to be two-sided tape. Is this shoddy workmanship or a vulnerable gesture, contrasting with the cold metal surface and the perfect circles?

The object falls between furniture and sculpture, and the viewer wonders whether or not to sit on it, or set something down on it. No no, we’re in an art gallery…

In Ice Flowers, Fleurs de Glace, another part of the Suite, 18 snowflake-shapes laser-cut cut from plate-sized aluminum disks scatter across the wall. The snowflakes reveal shadowed wall space. They might have been installed close enough to the wall to create a partly white, almost dimensional shape, or farther out to create interesting shadows. Instead the artist has chosen a slightly frustrating middle ground. Is this frustration part of the intent?

The third component of the Suite, La Cérémonie is a digital print, depicting a wrinkled hand proffering an antique off-white bowl seemingly filled with water. From a distance the red pattern on the bowl seems random. Does its colour correspond to the skirt on Valse? On closer inspection, the red pattern is floral, but it’s a darker, bluer red than the skirt. The grey cement wall in the background matches the metal in the snowflakes and table, though.

In Still points (of the turning world) the circle motif continues. Fifteen doubled layers of 2’ X 3’ paper occupy the place where two walls meet in a grid. A sheet of one-inch-grid flip chart paper with sharp-edged circles in gray periwinkle casein paint makes up each under layer. The three sizes of circles differ in diameter by millimeters. With a few larger graphite outlines of circles they are arranged without overlap within a larger pencil circle. Over this float sheets of vellum of the same size, with other, larger circles traced in red pencil.

Long dressmakers’ pins with round white heads secure the top two corners, and cast shadows on the paper. These might be brainstorming drawings for the constellations in the top of theValse table, but were created five years later, so does their reminiscence of pattern drafting along with the pins correspond to Valse’s skirt? This is a show of visual ensembles, but the correspondences may not mean anything. The periwinkle blue seems at odds with the grey aluminum – too close to contrast, but not matching.

The artist’s statement consists of a series of communications so abstract as to mean nothing at all. It crescendos with a list of abstract noun or noun phrases, lacking even a verb. Eyes skim over the text like oil trying to stick to water. The only substance I can find in the statement is the idea of “leaving room.” There is room in this exhibition, for a kind of wondering - something like looking up at the stars, or at snow falling on a winter night.