Tanya Brodsky

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

As a child, I stood guard while my father sawed lengths of pipe off stockpiles at a construction site, abandoned in Perestroika. These became fence posts at our dacha outside Kyiv, marking the newly privatized property line. Experiences like this have shaped my interest in malfunction within the built environment as a poetic framework for understanding the hidden logics of social formation. Fences and doors appear in my work as structures that channel motion, marking boundaries between residents, neighbors and guests. Keyholes, mail slots, outlets and vents function as illicit connections between the inside and outside, points of contact between architecture, the body, and the unseen guts that make buildings habitable. For the last several years, I’ve been making bronze casts of doors I found on the sidewalk, letting the wax pool in the seam-lines of the molds. Hung on the wall in a dysfunctional bas-relief or installed on custom museological mounts, the resulting sculptures hover between showroom display and archeological fragment, presented at the correct height of its real-life counterparts. While the casting process renders the utilitarian objects in the sculptures functionless, my drawings isolate point of sale display structures and blur the line between representations of buildings and maquettes. Keychains appear as both a link between architecture and the body, and as floating signifiers, imbued with markers of the near-past and tinged with flaccid corporate...

Artwork