Mary Brogger is a Chicago artist whose first solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art presents more conceptually oriented photoworks than her more usual (conceptually oriented) sculpture.
This is a surprise as well as a possible announcement, for at no time during her decade of showing objects in Chicago — Brogger was originally active in performance — did she seem one of those artists who change media and working method from project to project.
In the early 1990s, at any rate, Brogger’s medium was iron, and her method was to craft it into curtains, tapestries or carpets that reflected in some way on events from history.
Now Brogger’s photo pieces have shifted the focus from the outside world to herself, though she does not see it that way, having formulated a complex theory of how the “self” really is one with the “other.”
“Homeomorphic” is a work that perhaps conveys her theory most clearly. It’s a photographic tour of Brogger’s apartment. As if from the center of each of her spaces — living room, bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen — she has recorded what is on the outer boundaries and has fashioned a continuous three-foot-high strip of the images that runs around the gallery at eye level.
Through digital manipulation, Brogger has stretched images of her private space to fit the MCA’s public space, thereby “proving” they are one and the same. It is a visual trick, of course, but it’s convincing and has the effect of extending to Brogger’s entire environment the maxim: Show me your library and I’ll tell you who you are.
What she does show us — maps, lamps, cabinets, curtains, shelves, pictures, books — in fact tells us little about Brogger but more about her photographic manipulation, as the stretching is apparent in some sections of the strip, though the objects pictured still retain their basic character.
“Seeing and Believing,” a second large photo piece, works from a different premise, namely, that an unfamiliar point of view can transform an object to the point that even when we know what we’re seeing, sight may not be enough to lead to believing.
Here Brogger’s image is of a rural landscape taken while on a flight in a balloon. The artist has mounted a large transparency of the image on a light box that sits on the gallery floor, doubly forcing viewers to see it as she did, from above.
A broad, irregularly shaped area outlined by trees is the oddity, as if it’s one of those vast drawings made on the landscape that some have cited as “proof” of alien visitations. The viewpoint of the photograph makes what we see so ambiguous that viewers cannot be sure what to believe.
Brogger’s third, and final, work on view is the only piece in three dimensions, though it’s not, properly speaking, a sculpture. Made of fake fur affixed to a six-foot cylinder that tapers toward the top, the work resembles nothing so much as a greatly enlarged shoe buffer turned on its end and rotating.
The artist intends it to evoke the tall hat, or fez, worn by Sufi dervishes. Here, again, she is interested by the characteristics that bring disparate things together, as if they were one. It turns out to be circular movement.
As such motion governs the particles of atoms, so does it determine the ideal, sought-after state of the dervish who dances to lose his ego. Hence, the artist calls her piece “Tombstone of the Self,” additionally playing on the visual association between her exaggerated fez and old Turkish grave markers.
The problem here, as with all the pieces, is how Brogger’s chains of association are richer than the objects that are the first link. This didn’t used to be so when she was purely a sculptor. Her pieces then had interest apart from their conceptual program.
Now, however, she seems content to create banal, even campy, objects that serve best as extra-visual triggers.
———-
“Mary Brogger” continues at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave., through Sept. 28.
