Last Name First: New Work by Stephanie Brooks
By Fred Camper
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Implicitly Brooks critiques society’s institutions as cold, unemotional, dehumanizing; her work also reflects the feminist emphasis on individual emotions. But Brooks herself doesn’t see her pieces that way. A Chicagoan with an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Brooks, 27, told me her work is “about resignifying forms–about information, and how fluid it can be.” While she acknowledges that some of her work addresses depersonalization within large organizations, she expresses no particular alienation from our culture. “I’d love to do advertising,” she says. “I think it would be really exciting to come up with a Coke jingle.” Growing up in Zanesville, Ohio, she went to Catholic schools for 12 years, then discovered art making as an undergraduate at Ohio University. There she did “a lot of bad paintings in several genres,” she says, but also enjoyed graphic design; what helped initiate her present direction was the discovery of a book of international icons–the kind used on signs–along with readings about postmodernism.
Though Brooks speaks of her life and our culture with equanimity, I can’t help but see almost every one of her works as a critique. Twelve color photos of men standing in front of cars parked on the street seem to follow the form of the amateur snapshot of a person proudly displaying a possession. But the cars are all uncool station wagons, a few of them rather battered, and the title for this grid– Boys Who Drive Their Mothers’ Station Wagons–makes the work much more than a collection of funky snapshots. Brooks replaces the man-and-car macho pose with a kind of gender fuck: in our culture, boys proud to drive their mothers’ station wagons are hardly “real men.”
Brooks’s comments notwithstanding, her work seems unmistakably oppositional. The smooth, seamless surface of her pieces gives them their edge: the strong resemblance between each work and the conventional form on which it’s modeled makes the differences loom large. But beneath these surfaces lies a concern for the emotional self, as the viewer is reminded of the way that social structures sometimes seek to deny the wholeness of a person, confronting us with forms to fill out, arbitrary systems of measurement, rigid gender expectations, and the impossible demands of the workplace. Some pieces, like Directory, may encourage one’s emotional side, but others, like Self Portrait, reveal how society can quash it. Brooks offers a witty, moving commentary on the way the self can be fragmented by a society that denies each individual’s authentic, sensate core.
Carmichael, 32, a Chicagoan who grew up mostly in Michigan, has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute. Like Brooks, he found his voice only when he rejected various art-school influences: in college he made Sol LeWitt-like formal constructions and geometrical paintings influenced by modernist rhetoric. “I got very confused,” he says, “and I decided I should make something that’s more about me than about the art world.” So he began to incorporate the cartoons he’s been drawing since childhood. The bright, clownlike, divided man in the painting Guy Poking Thing With Stick has one bare leg and one clad in stripes, one bare arm and one covered by a blue sleeve. His long stick arcs down to the giant red blob he’s poking. With its various protrusions, the blob itself is rather odd, at once a symbolic monster and a bit of a joke on imagined monsters. The curving stick is obviously ineffectual as a weapon or a probe: it’s quite limp.
