Brenda Feist
As a sculptor and a writer, Brenda Feist is obsessed with form and space, and she points out that she is constantly searching for the form to suit the content. She suggests this obsession is with the shared edges of the work and the world. Her present research is involved with honouring all of the voices that have informed her own voice. This has led Feist to mine the arena of her memories that are directly involved with learning to read. She understands that as children, in the classroom, before the blackboard, we learn the visual representation of language and by this act, we are born again into abstraction. She states it this way. “From that moment on, we are double within ourselves, the body of the senses slowly replaced by a body of ideas”. Feist calls this “a transition from the pre-verbal” and admits that these thoughts and conclusions do not recede for her, but rather, grow in meaning and importance in her work.[16] Feist is an avid reader who has an oracular relationship with books and language. For instance, in a store or library, she allows an intuition to lead her to relevant texts and narratives important to her current research. Feist sees text and imagery as interchangeable forms of language and admits to cross-dressing her bible stories, fairy tales, fables and picture books since childhood.
Much of Feist’s earlier work speaks to the issues of erasure of authorship, as quite simply, much of her earlier work does not exist anymore, as for many years, she lived without a studio space. Not having sufficient space or income, she would produce works, and then deconstruct them, to use the materials again to articulate a new idea. The sculpture titled “First and Second Tongue” is an example of this. The work is an androgynous figure shaped out of clay. Feist explains the work this way. “The androgynous figure pulls a tongue from its mouth with both hands. The tongue runs the length of the torso, where it splits to follow both legs. The tasting tongue and the speaking tongue are held apart and taut as wire, between the toes of each foot. I find that this tension is always present in my work, as an articulation of the power of language to both separate us from and get us back to the body”.
These earlier figurative works have several central commonalities. Feist’s figures are articulated from the inside out, starting with an armature, then the skeletal bones, the musculature, and finally the layer of skin. However, some of work has a flayed aesthetic; some figures are left flayed, skinless. Feist attributes this aesthetic to her evangelical grandparents, who emphasized the expulsion from the garden as a result of our original sin. Feist thinks that we have been expelled from the body.[17] She articulates it in these terms. “The body is the garden, that we have been cast out of ‘Eden’ by the word, and the Fall is that separation”.
These early works remind Feist that for her, knowledge comes from her hands and fingers, and as such, art has becomes a hyper-focus that delivers to her an extreme power of attention contained in the process of making when working with materials such as clay[18]. Feist identifies this process as a way back to the garden.
Feist has told me that there are two constants in her creative practice; the binary hues of black and white, and the concept of the blackboard. The colours of black and white and the blackboard are combined with an ongoing research into the world of women’s magazines. In her own words, she suggests that her practice is focused on the human and animal body, the word, and the blackboard. Feist admits that women magazines haunt her with the unusual pairing of the language of gendered power which is combined with an odd relationship with the natural world. She finds this disempowering. In these magazines, some articles use the language of the wild and wildness that is meant to mirror some sort of freedom. For Feist this idea becomes distorted and perverted. Instead, the magazines present images of fur and leather garments, of dead, tamed, and/or trapped skins that are titled fur and leather fashion. Feist argues that these images of women, photographed on their knees and backs, wrapped tightly in dead animal skins, are presented in a binary scenario. She feels that the women are posed to stare vacantly into the camera; conversely, she feels that this stare is conjoined with, in her words, “ an orgiastic encounter with shoes, jewelry and chocolate”.
What Feist sees is a type of wearing of “skins”, skins that have been flayed or removed from an animal. The images present women as having no flesh of their own; their skin becomes the leather and fur skins of animals. These concerns are represented in her current work in which she is investigating what part of us is constructed and what part of us has always been there. And here, language is at the centre of her thesis. Feist describes it in these terms. “I still experience the exhilaration of a young girl cracking a Vogue magazine, only now it is tainted with the horror of an older woman, stumbling into Bluebeard’s closet. I am haunted by the juxtaposition of empowerment and freedom patter, with the vacant stares of young, hairless, bleached waifs, on their knees and backs, tied in ribbons and bows, wrapped in furs and chains, mimicking captive and domestic animals”.
She understands that societal language maps out thoughts, and then we live in that environment as young girls and women, or in her words, “we are born into ideas, and these ideas contain us, divide us, husband, herd and corral us”. She suggests that this leads us to become prisoners of mistaken identities. And the blackboard and chalk is a central component of this, language and the blackboard begin this societal mapping. Specifically, the colours of the blackboard and white chalk reflect her early memories of learning how to read.
Feist says that the animal represents the sensory body, mute, and stripped of its place and its power. Zoos and animal husbandry have had an ongoing placement in Feist’s work which began as research in her undergraduate studies at university. She states that the animals have always been in her work, open mouthed, pulling something from deep inside, flayed, stripped and hidden.[19] In Feist’s animals, there are hints of the human form and in her anthropomorphic figures, hints of the animal form. There is an odd beauty and fascination with the grotesque in these works. As viewers, this aesthetic can be understood through Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the “carnivalesque”. [20] Bakhtin suggests that in the time of the Middle Ages, carnival was a social institution which allowed for an arena of serious play, rehearsals and reversals of social roles that could instigate social change. One can see the aesthetics of the carnivalesque in Feist’s work where she provides a platform to have a discussion that challenges the fixed positions of rules and designations that are dictated by our social and political hierarchies.
Feist’s process, embedded in her current investigations, is a journey that reflects a great joy. Feist admits that she spends great amounts of time experimenting with materials and materiality, only to realize that this particular material is not “IT”; it does not articulate what she is searching for. But within this process, as she builds figures with an articulated skeleton, she is finding out what the figures are telling her, and then searches out other materials to continue the process. Feist explains “I spend a great amount of time experimenting with materials, and contemplating the zoology of self and my own multiplicity. Within this process, I listen to the work, and respond as best I can to what I have heard. My favorite philosopher, Michel Serres wrote “Do you call what circulates through the world and inside our bodies’ information or animal spirits?”
Feist has participated in an Eco-Art Project that was staged in the Woodhaven Sanctuary, which is a part of the Central Okanagan Regional District in Kelowna, BC. This project invited artists to produce work with an ecological content, which could exist in the wooded space, doing no harm in the ecological environment of Woodhaven. Through the local Okanagan political government, Woodhaven has been envisioned as a wild space, left to the natural cycles of the forest. Feist has produced a body of work that continues to investigate her lineage of voices that contribute to her ideas, and she has used clear Plexiglas as a lyrical metaphor for the boundaries of our liminal space; as a viewer, I see this material acting as the membrane that differentiates our inner and outer lives. She has drawn on this Plexiglas with a Dremel tool and suspended the Plexiglas in a free standing metal armature anchored into the ground. Feist has included texts in the drawn images, which she refers to as “phrases that stick”, phrases that no matter when or where she read it the first time, she remembers the ideas clearly. She calls these her lifelong phrases, ideas that stay with her, resonate, and unfold their meaning over time.[21] A selection of these phrases was employed in the Woodhaven Sanctuary work.
A text from Tors Nᴓrretranders[22] states that “The most important thing about humans is that we breathe”, the text blends with a linear depiction of our inner selves, which show the apparatus of our breath, our lungs and spine. In Feist’s work, Woodhaven Sanctuary becomes the ground upon which these ideas float before the viewer. One can sense why the ideas of Nᴓrretranders appeal to Feist, as he has written that he believes that the mind is more than what we see, and consciousness is what happens inside of us. She explained this to me in this way. “Nᴓrretranders explains that consciousness and its expression can be understood and grasped only when it is anchored in what discarded all that information: the body. If a baseball player thought about swinging at a pitch, he’d never hit the ball. Consciousness and its expression can be understood and grasped only when it is anchored in what discarded all that information: the body”. Nᴓrretranders also understands that the “me” that we recognize as ourselves is actually made up of other “mes” that we have encountered on our life journey.[23] Feist recognizes the complicated authorship of her ideas, understanding that her inner self has been imprinted by all the “other” mes she has encountered in her journey since meeting Dick and Jane; in her words, “being born into abstraction.”[24]
Another text from Nᴓrretranders that Feist has chosen has a site specific feeling to it. “There is more information in a random walk than in going from A to B”, a thoughtful idea when placed in the setting of Woodhaven Park. This quote is placed in the upper area of the Plexiglas, and is joined in the picture plane by a drawing of a brain: one half of the drawing shows the anatomical representation of our brains, and the other half of the brain is displayed like a circuit board, an analogue representation of the preferred map of ‘thinking’. In keeping with ideas of nature and the body, Feist also chose an anonymous third quote. “One way of measuring a tree is to fall out of it”. Quite so.
As a sculptor and a writer, Brenda Feist is obsessed with form and space, and she points out that she is constantly searching for the form to suit the content. She suggests this obsession is with the shared edges of the work and the world. Her present research is involved with honouring all of the voices that have informed her own voice. This has led Feist to mine the arena of her memories that are directly involved with learning to read. She understands that as children, in the classroom, before the blackboard, we learn the visual representation of language and by this act, we are born again into abstraction. She states it this way. “From that moment on, we are double within ourselves, the body of the senses slowly replaced by a body of ideas”. Feist calls this “a transition from the pre-verbal” and admits that these thoughts and conclusions do not recede for her, but rather, grow in meaning and importance in her work.[16] Feist is an avid reader who has an oracular relationship with books and language. For instance, in a store or library, she allows an intuition to lead her to relevant texts and narratives important to her current research. Feist sees text and imagery as interchangeable forms of language and admits to cross-dressing her bible stories, fairy tales, fables and picture books since childhood.
Much of Feist’s earlier work speaks to the issues of erasure of authorship, as quite simply, much of her earlier work does not exist anymore, as for many years, she lived without a studio space. Not having sufficient space or income, she would produce works, and then deconstruct them, to use the materials again to articulate a new idea. The sculpture titled “First and Second Tongue” is an example of this. The work is an androgynous figure shaped out of clay. Feist explains the work this way. “The androgynous figure pulls a tongue from its mouth with both hands. The tongue runs the length of the torso, where it splits to follow both legs. The tasting tongue and the speaking tongue are held apart and taut as wire, between the toes of each foot. I find that this tension is always present in my work, as an articulation of the power of language to both separate us from and get us back to the body”.
These earlier figurative works have several central commonalities. Feist’s figures are articulated from the inside out, starting with an armature, then the skeletal bones, the musculature, and finally the layer of skin. However, some of work has a flayed aesthetic; some figures are left flayed, skinless. Feist attributes this aesthetic to her evangelical grandparents, who emphasized the expulsion from the garden as a result of our original sin. Feist thinks that we have been expelled from the body.[17] She articulates it in these terms. “The body is the garden, that we have been cast out of ‘Eden’ by the word, and the Fall is that separation”.
These early works remind Feist that for her, knowledge comes from her hands and fingers, and as such, art has becomes a hyper-focus that delivers to her an extreme power of attention contained in the process of making when working with materials such as clay[18]. Feist identifies this process as a way back to the garden.
Feist has told me that there are two constants in her creative practice; the binary hues of black and white, and the concept of the blackboard. The colours of black and white and the blackboard are combined with an ongoing research into the world of women’s magazines. In her own words, she suggests that her practice is focused on the human and animal body, the word, and the blackboard. Feist admits that women magazines haunt her with the unusual pairing of the language of gendered power which is combined with an odd relationship with the natural world. She finds this disempowering. In these magazines, some articles use the language of the wild and wildness that is meant to mirror some sort of freedom. For Feist this idea becomes distorted and perverted. Instead, the magazines present images of fur and leather garments, of dead, tamed, and/or trapped skins that are titled fur and leather fashion. Feist argues that these images of women, photographed on their knees and backs, wrapped tightly in dead animal skins, are presented in a binary scenario. She feels that the women are posed to stare vacantly into the camera; conversely, she feels that this stare is conjoined with, in her words, “ an orgiastic encounter with shoes, jewelry and chocolate”.
What Feist sees is a type of wearing of “skins”, skins that have been flayed or removed from an animal. The images present women as having no flesh of their own; their skin becomes the leather and fur skins of animals. These concerns are represented in her current work in which she is investigating what part of us is constructed and what part of us has always been there. And here, language is at the centre of her thesis. Feist describes it in these terms. “I still experience the exhilaration of a young girl cracking a Vogue magazine, only now it is tainted with the horror of an older woman, stumbling into Bluebeard’s closet. I am haunted by the juxtaposition of empowerment and freedom patter, with the vacant stares of young, hairless, bleached waifs, on their knees and backs, tied in ribbons and bows, wrapped in furs and chains, mimicking captive and domestic animals”.
She understands that societal language maps out thoughts, and then we live in that environment as young girls and women, or in her words, “we are born into ideas, and these ideas contain us, divide us, husband, herd and corral us”. She suggests that this leads us to become prisoners of mistaken identities. And the blackboard and chalk is a central component of this, language and the blackboard begin this societal mapping. Specifically, the colours of the blackboard and white chalk reflect her early memories of learning how to read.
Feist says that the animal represents the sensory body, mute, and stripped of its place and its power. Zoos and animal husbandry have had an ongoing placement in Feist’s work which began as research in her undergraduate studies at university. She states that the animals have always been in her work, open mouthed, pulling something from deep inside, flayed, stripped and hidden.[19] In Feist’s animals, there are hints of the human form and in her anthropomorphic figures, hints of the animal form. There is an odd beauty and fascination with the grotesque in these works. As viewers, this aesthetic can be understood through Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the “carnivalesque”. [20] Bakhtin suggests that in the time of the Middle Ages, carnival was a social institution which allowed for an arena of serious play, rehearsals and reversals of social roles that could instigate social change. One can see the aesthetics of the carnivalesque in Feist’s work where she provides a platform to have a discussion that challenges the fixed positions of rules and designations that are dictated by our social and political hierarchies.
Feist’s process, embedded in her current investigations, is a journey that reflects a great joy. Feist admits that she spends great amounts of time experimenting with materials and materiality, only to realize that this particular material is not “IT”; it does not articulate what she is searching for. But within this process, as she builds figures with an articulated skeleton, she is finding out what the figures are telling her, and then searches out other materials to continue the process. Feist explains “I spend a great amount of time experimenting with materials, and contemplating the zoology of self and my own multiplicity. Within this process, I listen to the work, and respond as best I can to what I have heard. My favorite philosopher, Michel Serres wrote “Do you call what circulates through the world and inside our bodies’ information or animal spirits?”
Feist has participated in an Eco-Art Project that was staged in the Woodhaven Sanctuary, which is a part of the Central Okanagan Regional District in Kelowna, BC. This project invited artists to produce work with an ecological content, which could exist in the wooded space, doing no harm in the ecological environment of Woodhaven. Through the local Okanagan political government, Woodhaven has been envisioned as a wild space, left to the natural cycles of the forest. Feist has produced a body of work that continues to investigate her lineage of voices that contribute to her ideas, and she has used clear Plexiglas as a lyrical metaphor for the boundaries of our liminal space; as a viewer, I see this material acting as the membrane that differentiates our inner and outer lives. She has drawn on this Plexiglas with a Dremel tool and suspended the Plexiglas in a free standing metal armature anchored into the ground. Feist has included texts in the drawn images, which she refers to as “phrases that stick”, phrases that no matter when or where she read it the first time, she remembers the ideas clearly. She calls these her lifelong phrases, ideas that stay with her, resonate, and unfold their meaning over time.[21] A selection of these phrases was employed in the Woodhaven Sanctuary work.
A text from Tors Nᴓrretranders[22] states that “The most important thing about humans is that we breathe”, the text blends with a linear depiction of our inner selves, which show the apparatus of our breath, our lungs and spine. In Feist’s work, Woodhaven Sanctuary becomes the ground upon which these ideas float before the viewer. One can sense why the ideas of Nᴓrretranders appeal to Feist, as he has written that he believes that the mind is more than what we see, and consciousness is what happens inside of us. She explained this to me in this way. “Nᴓrretranders explains that consciousness and its expression can be understood and grasped only when it is anchored in what discarded all that information: the body. If a baseball player thought about swinging at a pitch, he’d never hit the ball. Consciousness and its expression can be understood and grasped only when it is anchored in what discarded all that information: the body”. Nᴓrretranders also understands that the “me” that we recognize as ourselves is actually made up of other “mes” that we have encountered on our life journey.[23] Feist recognizes the complicated authorship of her ideas, understanding that her inner self has been imprinted by all the “other” mes she has encountered in her journey since meeting Dick and Jane; in her words, “being born into abstraction.”[24]
Another text from Nᴓrretranders that Feist has chosen has a site specific feeling to it. “There is more information in a random walk than in going from A to B”, a thoughtful idea when placed in the setting of Woodhaven Park. This quote is placed in the upper area of the Plexiglas, and is joined in the picture plane by a drawing of a brain: one half of the drawing shows the anatomical representation of our brains, and the other half of the brain is displayed like a circuit board, an analogue representation of the preferred map of ‘thinking’. In keeping with ideas of nature and the body, Feist also chose an anonymous third quote. “One way of measuring a tree is to fall out of it”. Quite so.