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I first saw Luggage , a sculpture by Kristine Brambilla, during First Friday in May at the Red Dog Gallery. She was putting up an “Outhouse” of photographs on which she invited people to write. Next to the Outhouse , on a luggage   rack, was a battered aluminum Zero Halliburton case with sand, bones, and shells plastered into the lower half and a cross-section of lumber, and a page from a Chinese newspaper glued into the upper half. The large cow bones were painted red with flecks of yellow giving them a freshly butchered appearance. The shells look just like what a beachcomber might find in San Diego. But mixed in with the bones, the effect is unsettlingly. Perhaps this was a morbid souvenir from a bad day at the beach. And the top half with the lumber and Chinese newspaper brought to mind a ship wreck of an inbound freighter from China that drifted in on the tides.

Asked about Luggage Brambilla offers that it is morbid, and meant to make the viewer think about what they are seeing. It is morbid, and it does make me think. I found myself thinking about this piece over the next few months. The association of the objects, permanently ensconced in the suitcase creates an image that I couldn't quite label or make sense of. It was doing what art is supposed to do: confuse, enlighten, provoke. These objects were not collected with express purpose of memorializing a freaky vacation. Kristine Brambilla found these objects at different times and in different places. The shells were being donated to a charity but the donee couldn't accept the shells, so Kristine did. The bones were found during a pit stop off I-17 when a friend nearly sat on them. The case, covered in stickers from old rock bands and cities, had been junked, the newspaper came from a visit to San Francisco, and the wood made its way into the piece from Kristine's previous job driving a delivery truck. Luggage is intriguing because of the oddball assemblage of disconnected objects now permanently, literally cemented, together. As in Joseph Cornell's boxes, Luggage invites the viewer to make sense, somehow, of the piece.

Brambilla does eventually explain most of the objects are from things that had once been alive, but the shells, the wood, the bones, are still used in some way. Seashell collections are usually not referred to as dead mollusk collections, lumber is rarely called dead tree, the paper is dead tree pulp, and so only the bones are associated with death directly. That's a reasonable explanation of how the components are related, but the effect of the large white bones, the bright red paint, all of it in the once-fancy Zero Halliburton case is definitely morbid, confounding and exciting.

Kristine isn't a talker. She's doesn't spout off rambling philosophies of art or detailed comments about her work. An interview doesn't yield juicy quotes. Most of the time at First Fridays she's hidden under the bill of her baseball cap, fiddling with her digital camera. At the September First Friday Kristine experiments with her digital camera in a rapid sequence: wave camera around during long exposure, check image on LCD display, repeat, repeat, repeat. She produces work constantly and much of it is on display on her website at www.meangirlgallery.com . Over the past year she has devoted herself to her art full-time and hopes she can avoid going back to work driving a delivery truck. In that she faces the reality of artists anywhere: What will people buy? She toys with the idea of making her work more appealing to the art-buying public so she worked on larger canvases, with basic color schemes, but she avoids making it too commercial, “I can't work like that,” she says.

Daniel Friedman is a Phoenix artist and formerly a photographer, and a public school teacher.

:: visit :: www.thirdcareer.com
:: contact Daniel Friedman :: dfriedman3@cox.net

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