Mirror The Fool
Brian Sharrock
In Mirror the Fool, Brian Sharrock presents us with a suite of beautifully framed embroidered works. On their face, they’re evocative of familiar artifacts--a Rorschach test, a Magic Eye--but they unfold to become more elusive, gentler, more open, illustrating an evolution Sharrock himself has taken, wandering away from the more literal representations found in his past work, into a newer, undecided idea. The indecision is the intent. Brian has known how to be precise. With these works, though, he has committed to using that precision to explore what cannot be fully articulated, measured, complete. We get the feeling, as viewers, that we are working together with Brian to make sense of what we’re looking at.
Sometimes, you can imagine you are under a piece, staring up at it through branches. Otherwise, you are suspended above one, almost in peril of free-falling into its hypnotic vortex pattern. Each piece is provided with a frame--their only consistent boundary--that physically and psychically contain the images. The containment plays against itself, of course; the existence of the frames and the naturalistic inlays--at turns concretely mimicking webs, at times suggesting errant wisps of aerial roots--implies a space beyond the frame, allowing each piece to be a full world in itself, or a snapshot of a boundless dimension. The fool in this case may be anyone trying to square the divergent mediums; rather, their relationship is bound in their mutual undoing of the other, their graceful marriage of delicate execution and playful exploration.
After all, each piece is transformed multiple times over--drawn, transposed, sewn, framed--in a process of careful creation and metamorphosis, of losing and regaining oneself, as each refracted state presents itself anew. Then, there is the place each medium occurs, and how the realities of Brian’s life exist in these pieces. The precision and methodical habits required of a woodshop, pressed up against the intuitive and romantic elements of what a domestic life and craft call for. The pieces exist across these realities, they are borne from both physical representations of the dual labors into which Brian pours himself. One imagines that Brian and his works are at home in multiple worlds: at home in a gallery, at home in nature, at home at home. With these works, Brian is asking us all a question, and accepting that we may each have heard it differently; he welcomes all our answers.
- Frances Jin