Chris Brandstetter

Showing an unerring eye for the magic and spectacle of cast-offs and by-products in urban settings, Chris Brandstetter’s suite of four elaborate images can be grouped by their social history or spiritual affinity, a symphonic or narrative attribution, and various other traditional or archetypal groupings: earth, air, water, and fire, perhaps. But it’s attention to the images themselves, without any well-intended baggage, that yields the genuine reward.

Rust, itself a proxy for fire, blankets two ancient doors surrounded by graffiti and distorted industrial forms. In another image, a magnified transparent rosary cross hangs from a wire fence against a blurred industrial backdrop. Other images suggest a deep, useless-looking hole in the ground yielding to a stained white wall, rebar here and there, and extensive graffiti in the classic freight car style. A final image, a giant puddle forming a partial mirror image, displays a large field of graffiti reflected incongruously in the puddle and calls to memory the fractured, broken-up picture of the picture plane in cubism. In the middle of all this, and in bright red, reads the graffito “meow”.

All of Brandstetter’s images are pervaded by an underlying stillness that exists to give the subject matter a pedestal and in no way detracts from the liveliness of the outcome.  For the sumptuous details, the intricacies of shape and color, go well beyond the limitations subjects would normally impose. Although taken in unremarkable industrial settings, the subjects show the self-sufficiency of having been chosen, not merely assembled or picked at random.   Brandstetter’s work is likewise not the result of calculation or photoshopping. His photographs show things as they are, and we see them as few things are.

At a time so focused on politics, it is a great benefit to see with more clarity. Brandstetter’s work does not intervene in stock market reports or argue about the best forms of government. In fields of concrete and rubble where nothing grows, there are always lilies in the field. 

Jim Lee, Curator / Artist / Critic