COMING NOVEMBER 20th

November 20 - December 31

Opening reception November 20 6:30pm to 8:00pm

In our second Artist Invitational exhibition we have the amazing works of Stephanie Brunia!

Her photography show, To Name One's Heart, will run from Thursday, November 20 to Wednesday, December 31 with an opening ceremony on Thursday, November 20 from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Light snacks and refreshments will be provided. Hope to see you there!

Stephanie Brunia: To Name One’s Heart 

In [Between] the Ongoing

by Michaela Mullin

“The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.”

-Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography

Stephanie Brunia’s exhibition, To Name One’s Heart, spans –- it spans years, milestones, seasons, days … it spans media, scale and walls. The works in this show range from 2015 - 2025, which also makes duration a recurring theme and subject.

Brunia’s practice owes much to the criticism and philosophy of photography, as well as literature. Her love of words as primary visual tools is also key to the work she creates. But she acknowledges that words are very loaded, and she is careful not to allow “the words to override the image.” The personal is what interests her, and the archiving of everything experienced. But how to do that, to locate the essence of being, through the essence of being represented (or being the one representing)—this is the real search. 

Brunia constantly seeks to create photographs that can’t quite be described. Her former work exposes this fear of words supplanting image, where her titles are uniform within each series, using one-word titles, such as “Attempt” or “Gesture.”  This is not to say the images cannot be differentiated, of course. Each is given a number: sequence or date, by which they can be organized and catalogued—archived. Previous bodies of work were very staged, clearing space of anything extraneous, so that the human bodies being connected created the mysterious punctum—what Roland Barthes considered the detail of a photograph that pierces the viewer with meaning—without the eye being too distracted from other ambient objects.In her words, Brunia was thinking about making art with a capital “A”. 

But carrying her camera around to document the daily, or mundane, was something Brunia was not inclined to do. That is, until her daughter was born (the ever-present camera was also a shock to her husband and stepdaughters). This is when she realized she could, in fact, document the daily, because it was now a witnessing. Another important factor, she notes, is that she was “craving people’s archives and wondering how one might build such a thing”— how to bring one’s sensibilities to the archive without all the staging. 

She acknowledges most mothers don’t identify their photographic albums academically or commercially, where part of the intention is sharing memory or culture to a more public audience. For Brunia, however, in quotidian endeavors such as this, the idea of the mystery of the everyday isn’t always conveyed, and so Brunia believes it’s ultimately “about sensibility—what can you call it but the in between.” She wanted more than cute pictures; she wanted the poignant moments, and Everything. In. Between. To get these, she needed to shift between intention and intuition, between sentiment and more objectively appreciated moments; she had to snap no matter what “hat” she was wearing at any given time.

The whole of To Name One’s Heart has integrated all the concepts that came before into one diaristic series, each work here titled, Untitled (is this an attempt or gesture at un-titling things already named (numbers included)?). The photographs are notes and traces, movement and stillness; and together, curated in a way that itself mimics the motions of life with its ebbs and flows, it hits spare notes and emotional density: Brunia often hangs many smaller photos over or around larger images, breaking the grid she mentally lives with throughout the creating, so images appear to “swarm.”

She is interested in exploring the familial as well as social, and the connection and loneliness felt by individuals within groups. “The essence of being represented” is at the heart of Brunia’s artistic thinking and practice. In the process of taking the photographs included in this exhibit, she didn’t want to take away the story from the subjects, to say or name what someone else desires, or to speak the story of her daughter or stepdaughters. 

When the exhibition was first installed, a viewer in the gallery mentioned to Brunia that it felt like an experience of being in family life instead of describing the idea of living with others. This distance needed to find that intimacy is a balance Brunia’s always trying to locate. In these photographs all things can be found: a dog, traces of a dog in snow, death of a dog, lipstick, formal portraits, father and daughter(s), arched backs, sippy cups and shadows, kiddie pools and children’s toys, tiny hands on glass doors, large hands on eye styes, and shadows. 

The image used to promote this exhibition is a closeup of Brunia’s daughter, with her mouth opened, just so. Brunia relinquished control, she said, and in the process, was left with something that “felt like a pause.” Again, for her, these are in-between moments, the almost-not-but-just-found areas of being. In the beginning, her toddler was more performative, and Brunia would create a theatrical distance, given that a child so young is unpredictable. With her stepdaughters, who are older, Brunia felt that getting in close, despite feeling inauthentic at the time, created an intimacy in the work. This exploration of (or is it a certain practice of) Motherhood can perhaps be seen as the opposite of Brunia’s intent behind certain previous works, where she was driven by an instinct to “stave off” the decline of her father. 

As a photographer of youthful bodies and actions, there may be a staving off of sorts, but it isn’t in the vein of stopping death, one presumes, but rather in the desire to experience growth, and in doing so, attempting to hold on to any given stage of that growing. It’s the other side, the earlier vibrant side, of that inevitable in(de)cline. It is an added layer of resistance. But it is also a joyfully questioning way to inherit the movement of time and space, and it is reminiscent of something Sarah Manguso, who wrote what Brunia considers to possibly be the best book on photography (that isn’t on photography), Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (Graywolf Press, 2015):

The best thing about time passing is the privilege of running out of it, 

of watching the wave of mortality break over me and everyone I know. 

No more time, no more potential. The privilege of ruling things out. 

Finishing. Knowing I’m finished. And knowing time will go on without me.

To Name One’s Heart is insular and open, personal and communal; it is art with a beautiful lower-case “a”, and more powerful for it. The articles “a” and “an” are the grammatical signposts of and indefiniteness that haunts us but shouldn’t—it’s the naming of a singular thing while acknowledging there are other singular things of its ilk, or kin, which ultimately, is the exuberant, if not confounding, announcement of life’s existential plurality.