Reed van Brunschot

Reed van Brunschot is a Peruvian/Dutch/American Visual Artist & Educator, working with sculpture, performance, installations, and video art. She received her MFA from the University of Southern California's Roski School of Art and Design in 2019 and her BFA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie voor het Kunst in Amsterdam in 2011. She has had exhibitions internationally and is currently based in Los Angeles.

Her artworks take on displacement, daily life through the ‘transitional moment’, one in which a given situation suddenly and unexpectedly changes, be it in form or in sentiment. By building relationships between unexpected elements, through materialization, or correlation to the viewer, there is an emphasis on a dialog between the human, and the absurd object. Speaking in quotidian symbolism, her practice is based on themes of childhood, home life and all things ephemeral.

I understand that a universal balance exists and that life can be bitter and/or incredibly sweet. A kind of tit-for-tat, up to its downs, the humor and pathos of all of it wrapped into one. We cannot know what true happiness is without experiencing sadness, and because of that, we appreciate happiness all the more. And then there are those places that lie in between that bittersweetness, the liminal spaces where we catch our thoughts and recalibrate. My work likes to find these spaces, freeze-frame them, re-materialize them for introspection, make the amalgamation of two contrasting sentiments that live together, celebrate these quiet moments that exist, and then laugh at the absurdity of it all.

All of my work looks at the everyday objects around us as a visual language, filled with metaphor and meaning in their simplicity. These objects are composed in a tongue-in-cheek manner but allow space to look at beauty in the darker issues within. They are meant to house those contrasts in a mimetic way, not asking for you to choose a side but to live within it and contemplate these dualistic ideas. There are many lived moments I feel that can be universally understood; an anticipated birthday party that did not go as planned, a waiting line at the airport that is empty but you have to walk through its maze anyway, the achievement of buying a home and arguing over its dirty dishes, small things that hold bigger issues and ideas. Celebrating moments where things go wrong and right and that are completely and utterly human.

BITTER/SWEET features several artworks from the last eighteen years of my art practice of exploring the complex coexistence of contradictions.

In 2012, in Amsterdam, I meticulously hand-crafted The Living Room, a large-scale funeral installation out of paper and glue. At the time, I was going to a lot of funerals and was struck by all the components that made up the pomp and circumstance of it all, with its staging, abundant fabrics, pillows, curtains, glitchy microphones, and kitschy wreaths. The creation of the funeral installation space was first and foremost to honor the beauty of the ritual while also being introspective about what it is that we need, and what we really need. The work, by the nature of its fragile material, was not meant to last. It is delicate and evokes a visceral feeling to stand next to hollow white paper. A shell reminding us of the impermanence of things, of the impermanence of being, while serving as a reminder that we are very much here, now.

The title, The Living Room emerged because, during Victorian times, the recently deceased were displayed in a home parlor called the “death room.” It was only when this practice stopped that these spaces were now referred to as “living rooms.” For the first time in over a decade after losing this work, I have methodically recreated The Living Room again for this exhibition. The practice of remaking it, makes me think a lot about current events, both in the fragile impermanence of things, but also in the ability to rebuild.