Cristine Brache

Interview by Wallace Ludel

For a recent video commissioned by the ICA Miami, Miami-born, Toronto-based artist Cristine Brache recorded a conversation with her grandmother and overlaid it onto a collage of varying found footage. In the video, Brache’s grandmother tells the artist about a time in 1961 when she was quarantined in a mental hospital for morning sickness which was later discovered to be caused by her being pregnant with Brache’s father. Having emigrated from Puerto Rico, doctors believed it to be an infectious disease she had caught prior to relocating to the mainland United States, rather than pregnancy-related nausea.

Such personal mythologies are central to Brache’s work, which often starts in this place of the individual and expands outwards, casting wide, compassionate ripples which allude to universal truths surrounding the gaps between our desires and our realities. There’s lonesomeness and there’s listening. Brache—whose work is frequently sculptural as well—also approaches materials with a certain devotion, employing such mediums as mother of pearl and bone china, which allows the work to vibrate at a reverential frequency, creating shrine-like worlds of veneration.

Wallace Ludel (WL): For your recent ICA Miami commission, you recorded a conversation between you and your grandmother and used that audio in the piece. You often reference your family in your artwork but it usually feels a little more coded, like you use personal signifiers rather than being so explicit.

Cristine Brache (CB): My work is informed by my experiences, alongside current and historical events. This video relates to the show at Fierman, which is an expression of this story that my grandmother told me, but I didn’t state that explicitly in the Fierman show. I wanted to make a second part to that show, and in the first part I wanted to make the reading as omnipresent as possible, while embedding it with a personal experience that is relatable. The show was generally about gaslighting and codifying behavior to survive or to navigate within an oppressive system that doesn’t allow you to be yourself. There were hospital curtains because it was also talking about the historic institutionalization of women that comes as a result of unacceptable self-expression. It branched off of what I felt when my grandmother was telling me that story for the first time.

For the second installation, I wanted to make a quarantine room—and this was six months before the pandemic. Before the pandemic happened, I was obsessively looking at images of quarantine rooms and mocking them up, and I was thinking about isolation. If I were to do that show right now it would have a totally different meaning, it’s no longer a good time to realize it. So, when the ICA video commission got offered to me, I thought it would be the perfect place to wrap up this area of interest that I’d been mining. The video also addressed the quarantine, but in a way that wouldn’t further inundate us with that imagery. It would be hard to feel the impact, because it’s so close and unmediated. The image itself is too tapped out. Before all this, images of quarantine felt foreign and took on a different meaning. I also made the video in quarantine, so a lot of the choices were contingent on the limitations in place at the time of its making. I couldn’t travel, I didn’t have any way to record, so I used the audio of my grandmother and edited together a lot of found footage.

WL: Do you think the limitations proved to be fruitful for the project? Did they make it more interesting than it otherwise would have been?

CB: It’s hard to say—I’m super happy with the way it turned out so I guess the answer is yes. I wouldn’t have gone this route if the limitations hadn’t been in place. There’s always some kind of limitation in every form of artmaking, until I’m Jeff Koons or something, ha. All the work I make is contingent upon limitations in some way, but this was especially constrained.

Looks can be deceiving (detail view), 2019

Clairol True-to-Light mirror, cinder blocks, weight scales, porcelain

42 x 22 x 22 in.

WL: It’s interesting to hear you talk about personal versus universal iconography regarding the quarantine imagery. You make a lot of work about your family—what do you think happens when that work goes into the world and its components become universal signifiers, moving beyond just what they mean to you personally?

CB: I’m really empathy driven, and I hope to create more awareness for each other’s experiences, and to share underrepresented experiences. My goal is often to use my personal experience to address bigger systemic issues. It’s important for me to have both of those things going on in a narrative —- that it’s rooted in a personal thing but I’m also trying to open it up so it’s more accessible. That accessibility is ideal for me because hopefully more people will be able to relate to it; if it’s too closed off it can be difficult to reach other people. For me, art is about reaching people and telling stories. I’m trying to find something that feels uncanny in order to create a feeling that’s relatable to a variety of experiences. If the reading isn’t uncanny, it won’t succeed. It’s like word games but with objects.

WL: In your poems and in your sculpture, you structure the narratives with a certain amount of ambiguity that asks the viewer to do some of the work. Is that what you’re touching on?

CB: That’s part of it. I think it’s important to retain space for the viewer to occupy with their own feelings and interpretations. I don’t want to define things too much -- I want to present a subset where people can draw their own meaning based on their own experiences, and we can kind of meet in the middle somewhere. That space in the middle is hopefully more care, or more awareness or empathy.

WL: How important is it to you that your narratives are clear?

I love storytelling. It’s important to me because I don’t want to waste people’s time. I don’t take it for granted that I’m making work for people to see —- I think someone’s attention is very precious when they choose to give it to you. I want to be able to have something that’s concise, impactful and meaningful to be with. I don’t want to take anything for granted. It’s important for me to be clear and to understand what I’m doing —- I have to be responsible to the work, to myself, and to the audience by knowing why they’re there, why I’m there, and why the work is there. And this is just me personally, there are a lot of different ways to make art, these are just the values that I choose to uphold. If I’m inviting somebody into a world, I want them to know that I care that they’re there, and I think that comes across through the care that I employ in the work.

The exhibition text is a really important space for me to be as generous as I can with everything that I was thinking that led up to making the work. I don’t think that the work necessarily has to have the exhibition text by it, but definitely it can help fill in holes for people if they need that.

"I love storytelling. It’s important to me because I don’t want to waste people’s time. I don’t take it for granted that I’m making work for people to see—I think someone’s attention is very precious when they choose to give it to you. I want to be able to have something that’s concise, impactful and meaningful to be with. I don’t want to take anything for granted."

WL: It can be the link between the work and the motivation behind it. What we’re talking about, which are two things that sound contradictory but exist together and feed off of each in your work, are narrative and ambiguity. It sounds counter intuitive but they’re two strengths of yours that coexist well, and a press release can act as a mediator between them.

CB: Another thing that acts as a mediator is my videos. I love video, and I think it’s a really great form to help storytelling because people are more ready to approach the medium with narrative in mind. It’s a good space to help people, not that they need help, but it’s good to offer —- I want the experience to feel complete for the person who’s coming to my show.

WL: What does a complete experience look like?

CB: It’s hard to answer that because everybody is so different, people see art for very different reasons, but I guess I try to think first about the physical and conceptual quality of the objects in the show. For me, the simplest way to say it is, was I true to myself? If I was true to myself and I don’t feel like there was any kind of major compromise, then it’s complete. When I go to see art, I feel it’s complete if I’m touched or affected by it.

WL: Another strength of yours is juxtaposition. You take found objects and put them in a context with objects that very much feel made by hand, as well as the juxtaposing of scale and mediums. This creates a new encounter that’s greater than the sum of its parts. I’m thinking of the figure perched on the scales in your Locust Project show, but you can find it all over.

CB: With the found objects in that show, I felt that they were really the best way to represent what I was trying to communicate, and it’s how I envisioned it. And they are symbols. You play with images and people draw new meanings from the games that you make with them —- so I’m thinking of objects and my relationship to them and culture.

In that show, the vanity in front of that figure is the same one that my mother and grandmother had. My grandmother practices Santeria, and that was somewhat hidden. The end of a hallway in my grandmother’s house was walled off because she rented out the other half, so this long hallway just ended in a wall and she had a lot of shrines there. She would give them offerings and things like that, and she would have mediums at her house that we would talk to. I felt too intimidated to ask her about it because I felt I wasn’t allowed to, but it was something that was always around. When I was in my twenties, I was able to reconnect with my grandmother and talk to her about this. I was really depressed and she wanted to help me get rid of an evil eye that her medium said I had on me, so we did this really beautiful ritual. From then on I felt invited into her world, and since then I’ve been able to talk more openly with her about it. We have a really close relationship now. Before that I knew her as my grandmother who was super loving and let me watch Nickelodeon and made awesome food, but that’s it. I wanted to know her identity. That’s how I found out the story about what happened when she was pregnant with my father.

Santeria is a syncretized religion, it was brought over by the Yoruba tradition from West Africa, slaves brought it to the Caribbean. It was practiced widely but when Spaniards colonized the Caribbean they outlawed it, so people coded it with Catholic iconography and saints, so there’s a correlating Catholic symbol for everything in Santeria so that people could practice it without being persecuted. It made me think of all the ways that people code their behavior so that they don’t die. I was thinking about my grandmother, mother, and sister for the Locust Projects show, and the ways they’ve codified their behaviors. My grandmother was never allowed to work and her identity was very firmly rooted in her appearance because that was really the only way that she was really allowed to express herself. She had her appearance, cooking, and her kids. When I was really young she was hard on me because I didn’t wear makeup; I never understood it until a year or two before that show when I was really talking to her more and I learned it was how she feels she can operate in the world because it’s what she has. In Looks can be deceiving, I wanted the nostalgia of finding similar scales that I remember her having when I was a kid.

Gaslight (after Remedios Varo's Papilla Estelar 1958), 2020

Steel, resin, LED

26 x 22 x 10 in.

WL: So your artmaking has brought you closer to your family?

CB: Yeah, definitely. I started getting close to my grandmother when I was about 24 —- something that’s really special about my her is that she always has a medium that she’s consulting with, so she’ll check in on our family through the medium. She’ll call me sometimes and tell me that the medium says I need to be careful of certain things, and I enjoy that kind of care from her. The thing that’s put a lot of pressure on me is that her medium thinks that I am meant to be a painter, and if I paint I will become truly successful. Whenever I talk to her, the first thing she’ll do is ask if I’ve picked up a paintbrush, and she’ll kind of scold me about it in an endearing way. In a lot of ways she’s directly involved in my artwork.

Starting with my 2017 show at Fierman, I also try to preserve my own history in my work. If I can capture a feeling or a memory, and it’s related to my grandmother or my sister or my mother or me, it kind of gives them a long-lasting physical memorial. It’s for the world and also for them. There are so many people that don’t have voices —- I mean whose concerned with my grandmother’s story? Just me -— and her story is super important just like everybody’s is, and I want to create space for that as well.

WL: Are you going to paint, like her medium suggests?

CB: I’ve tried. I made one painting in 2018 just to see if I still could; I did actually get my BA in painting, but I never developed my own style, and I think finding your own style is the hardest thing to do with anything. Also I’m so drawn to sculpture and video —- I’m not opposed to painting but it doesn’t feel right for now.

WL: Some of your installations have a shrine-like quality, does that come from being around your grandmother’s shrines?

CB: Not intentionally (except the Locust Projects show) but the things I choose to make work about have a lot of honor to me so I can see how it might come across that way. At Locust Projects specifically, there was a shrine for my grandmother, a shrine for my sister, and a shrine for my mother.

"The thing that’s put a lot of pressure on me is that her medium thinks that I am meant to be a painter, and if I paint I will become truly successful. Whenever I talk to her, the first thing she’ll do is ask if I’ve picked up a paintbrush, and she’ll kind of scold me about it in an endearing way. In a lot of ways she’s directly involved in my artwork."

WL: I think of you very much as a maker, and I know that some of the raw materials you work with are quite precious, such as mother of pearl, bone china, and porcelain. I’m curious in your belief in the sanctity of material.

CB: I definitely care a lot about what materials I use. I think all materials are precious, even if someone is working with garbage or found items, but I really enjoy raw materials and the way they just are what they are. Like the way clay comes from the earth rather than being made. I also find resins and plastics to be super precious even though they’re so widely available, I think about all the damage they do to the environment –- using plastic has a great cost. I’m really fascinated with where things come from and how they work —- how mixing two liquids together can form this solid thing, or how you can take clay from the earth, add water to manipulate it, then fire it at a certain temperature and it becomes this other thing.

WL: It’s alchemy. It brings us back to the idea of juxtaposition in your work —- alchemy can be taking two things and mixing them together to create a third, new thing. And I feel that way when you mix two signifiers, or when you mix found objects with made objects, you create a new thing.

CB: I’ve never thought of it like that, but yeah totally. In my last show at Fierman I was really drawn to the women surrealists, and they were so into alchemy. Before that, a couple people had told me that my work was really surreal and I would say that I wasn’t drawn to Surrealists, because I didn’t know about women Surrealists, I just associated it with like Magritte.

WL: Like Leonora Carrington and that school?

CB: Yeah, and they’re so much more interesting than the men. I always pushed back when people called my work surreal, but now that I know about this whole canon of women who were just left behind, and I see their work, I’m super excited to indulge it. Alchemy is a good word to describe it, from the layers to the positioning to what the objects are made of.

WL: It’s like the literary phrase parataxis -— the placing of two unlike thoughts or images next to one another in a piece of writing. You create parataxis within a suite of objects. When I taught creative writing, the best way I came up with explaining parataxis was by describing still life paintings —- if you look at a Dutch still life, you might have a skull next to a crown next to a fish, and suddenly you don’t just have these three objects but you have this new thing which is the tension these objects create when they’re together. The result of the parataxis is the alchemy.

CB: That’s nice, I’ve never heard that before.

Commit Me, Commit to Me (Cázame, Cásame), 2020

Exhibition detail view, Fierman Gallery, New York

WL: You’ve said that poems are the space where you let yourself be unapologetic about your feelings —- what’s the difference in the approach, and does it look like when you’re being held back in the art making?

CB: When I’m making artwork, I’m making it for myself but I’m also making it for an audience, so I consider the audience a lot. I don’t mean that with any negative connotation, I don’t think it’s bad to do that. When I write poems, I basically just write them for myself. The poems are also more specific to a particular feeling or experience I’m trying to articulate. Some of my poems are very depressing or harsh. I don’t want to make someone seeing my artwork feel that way, some poems can be so painful and sad, I think it’s a lot not to pull someone into pain and sadness without giving them some kind of respite from it at the same time, and I don’t know if my poems provide that or not, but in that space I try to honor my feelings without being concerned with anything else.

WL: Your artmaking deals with real shit too, so where does the respite come in there? In the physical intrigue and beauty of the objects?

CB: The respite is in the mediation —- my artwork is about my feelings but it goes through so many stages beyond them. In my artwork, I’m thinking more about patterns I see in the world, in my family or in the historical treatment of women or minority groups, I’m thinking more about the collective, but when I write poems I just about myself.

WL: And you’re doing a poem-by-mail project right now?

CB: I’m writing one poem a month right now and mailing it out to people. It’s really nice to write in this way and share it with people through Patreon. It’s really intimate, a nice way to share poetry. Where I’m at now, I’m thinking more about consolation, love, loss, and validation. I’m writing more in that realm, while my first book of poems was more about sexism and other grievances.

WL: What brought you back to love?

CB: With my first book, I’d been sitting on a lot of poems that go back to about 2008, and there was a lot of processing in my twenties and a lot of relationships and growing pains —- learning about myself and learning about how I’m situated in the world and how I situate myself. It was like a big purge for me, and now I guess I just feel a lot of love, and that people more than ever need to be consoled, so that’s what I want to put out in the world.

Wallace Ludel

Wallace Ludel is an artist and writer. His writing has appeared in Artforum, BOMB, Cultured, Elephant, Narrative, No Tokens, Sporklet, Triangle House Review and elsewhere. He is also a weekly contributor to The Art Newspaper. He received his MFA from New York University where he has also taught creative writing. He is at work on a full-length collection of poems.