[ bryan gill ]

Exhibition Synopsis In this exhibition, Bryan Nash Gill continued to explore and broaden a longstanding commitment to materials and process, rooted in nature, but only fully understood through the interventions of the artist. In one piece, bark stripped from a tree was stretched and mounted on wooden stretchers as one would canvas for a painting. Then the tree’s “skin” was reassembled in the gallery in a piece forty-two feet long. Bark read as the surface of an abstract expressionist painting, the subject standing in for a medium, transcending both scale and dimension as the mind fibrillates between perception and cognition. In another piece, tree branches rendered in bronze were eerily conjoined, Siamese, emerging from each other’s stems with no visible reference to a trunk, to having grown from anything other than each other. A third piece filled an entire room with the curling, warping, tightening slabs of an oak tree, the smell of the wood announced the installation before one’s eyes perceived it.

Gill offered his audiences a unique and sincere perspective on nature that did not attempt to explain or define it, but rather to create a rare opportunity to revel in its sublime beauty. Beautiful, enigmatic, and sometimes frightening, these works were as unpredictable and open-ended as nature herself. This exhibition also included painting, bronze and wood sculpture, and an installation created specifically for Real Art Ways’ gallery space.

Biography Gill has exhibited widely throughout the state of Connecticut, including Paesaggio Gallery, the New Britain Museum of American Art, and the William Benton Museum of Art at the University of Connecticut. Nationally, he has shown at, amongst others, the Brunner Gallery in Louisiana, the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Massachusetts, the Greene Gallery in Florida, and the Leighton Gallery in Maine. Gill has been the recipient of two individual artist grants from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Greater Hartford Arts Council. In 1995, he was part of a group exhibition at Real Art Ways titled RAW Space.

Curator's Essay Walking through this exhibition, one might understandably make the mistake of thinking one has come upon an artist making work about nature. But here is a clue that this is a misreading of the work of Bryan Nash Gill: there is an important difference between being in the landscape and being of the landscape. The use of the preposition in (contradictorily) suggests that we exist outside the natural world, that we are the stewards of Genesis, that human consciousness is unique and distinct from the anima of the forest, that nature is to be contained, negotiated, mitigated, maintained. Here an artist sits apart from the natural world, making work that seeks to understand a relationship between two discrete “things.” But being “of the natural world” one imagines the totality of the Tao, of dharma, or Heidegger, where the artist is an integral part of the natural world, resonating with all rhythms, each breath, each step, each blink, each twinge, one part of a seamless, shared, experience. Nevertheless, the work in this exhibition is not a celebration of this relationship so much as it is a rigorous, unforgiving and even frightening attempt by an artist to understand self. This is not Bryan Nash Gill romanticizing the forest. This is the forest of the Brothers Grimm. An entire tree is stripped of its bark, which is mounted on wooden stretchers as would be the hide of an animal or the canvas for a painting. Bark reads as the surface of an abstract expressionist painting, the subject becomes the medium, scale and dimension are transcended as the mind fibrillates between perception and cognition. Tree branches rendered in bronze are eerily conjoined, emerging from each other’s stems with no visible reference to a trunk, or to having grown from anything other than each other. When one realizes that one is of the forest more than one is in the forest, then one has come to see that a walk in the woods is not just a walk in the woods, that the forest is not a park. Nature is beautiful, but it also gets dark.

— Steven Holmes, Curator


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Exhibition Checklist All works courtesy of Paesaggio Gallery, West Hartford, CT

Title wall:
1.-3. Untitled 1994
1/4 mile wire, thirty two Douglas Fir trees; 10’x60’x67’
4. It’s Not Just the Place, But the Thing in the Place1995; Spruce trees stripped of their bark, planted grass; Each bundle 12’ h.; Installation view, Chesterwood, MA
5. Needles 2000 Pine needles, wire, netting. 36’x33’
6. Circumference of a Tree 1994; Grapevines, wire. 107”x60”x39”

Main gallery:
1. Twin 2000; Bronze
2. Cortex 1996; Spruce bark, wood
3. Oak, Maple 1997; Mixed media on canvas
4. Blow Down 2001; Spruce bark
5. Hip 2001; Pine
6. Bark Relief #1 2000; Copper plated bark
7. Bark Relief #2 1996 Copper plated bark
8. Bark Relief #4 2000 Bronze
9. Bark Relief #5 2001 Copper
10. Bark Relief #3 2001 Bark, copper
11. Oak Branch 1999 Bronze, copper
12. Untitled 1994 Black walnut
13. Installation at RAW 2001 Oak