LISA BRAWN "Take Me To Your Leader," October 24 to November 16, 2009, AXIS Contemporary Art, Calgary
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"Lady With a Hat: Self Portrait"
Lisa Brawn, "Lady With a Hat: Self Portrait," woodcut, 2007.
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"Jim Jones"
Lisa Brawn, "Jim Jones," woodcut, 2009.
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"Lady With a Hat: Self Portrait"
Lisa Brawn, "Lady With a Hat: Self Portrait," woodcut, 2007.
LISA BRAWN
Take Me To Your Leader, October 24 to November 16, 2009, AXIS Contemporary Art, Calgary
BY: Patricia Dawn Robertson
“I’ve hit a vein. I’ve got my medium. I’ve got my genre. I don’t have to reinvent it when I work at it. I can just do it,” says Calgary artist Lisa Brawn about her woodcuts. Brawn is fascinated by, and alert to, the eccentric world around her. She explores her natural curiosity through startling portraits of obscure dictators, carnies, cowgirls and evangelists.
When she spoke to Galleries West recently she was “coming down” from the Calgary Stampede, where her work was showcased as part of the new Artist’s Ranch project for contemporary artists. Brawn and four other artists spent two weekends in retreat as artists in residence at the Calgary Stampede Ranch near Hanna, Alberta, before showing at the annual fair and rodeo.
This year has been good to Brawn. She has spent 20 years making art and curating, but she’s only just come into her own in the last while. After making the decision in 2000 to commit full-time to her art practice, she’s been rewarded with new commissions, exhibitions in Austin and Seattle, an Alberta Foundation for the Arts grant and a commission to design a set of civic banners that now fly over Calgary’s bridges.
Brawn’s decision to work exclusively in one medium, offset with the singular dedication that keeps her tied to her home studio, has paid dividends. She first fell in love with woodcuts when she was a student at The Alberta College of Art and Design. “My heart just stopped the first time I saw a woodcut,” she recalls. “It’s really graphic and the process is really absolute. There is no room for any mistakes.” Starting out, she practiced on plywood, made at least a thousand pieces, and then graduated to pine. Then she acquired a massive pile of 100-year-old Douglas fir beams from the old Alberta Block building in downtown Calgary. Out of those aged pieces came the themes for vintage characters and portraits. Brawn also finds great primary material for subject matter in the extensive photography archives at the Glenbow Museum.
Among the portraits on display at Axis Contemporary Art Gallery’s Take Me to Your Leader show will be Brawn’s take on Jim Jones, ten Prime Ministers, obscure cult leaders, Tammy Faye Bakker and Reverend Moon. Brawn also recently showed a sneak preview of a portrait of Liberal Opposition leader Michael Ignatieff in Edmonton, calling it PM 23. The show fits in well with Brawn’s ongoing obsession and life-long bid to capture celebrity and the cult of personality. “One idea leads to the next,” she says. “And one series bleeds into the other. For example, I find something interesting in Western culture, like the campy elements of cowgirls, trick ropers and The Rifleman and that leads me to Western locales like Austin, where I’m exploring iconic musicians.”
The most surprising element of Brawn’s great year has been the public reaction to her work. “I’m actually starting to get fan letters from people. One musician from Austin wrote to me with suggestions for subjects. I think his list had about 100 iconic people on it. When I told him I was coming to Austin to show my work in conjunction with South by Southwest, he was very excited,” she says. “I have so many ideas coming at me for new subjects, I don’t think I’ll ever run out. It keeps me interested.”
