March 2025 AIR: Jan Brugger
“Exaggerated, leaking or bursting at the seams”
Hi Jan! We’re so excited to have you at LATITUDE! To start, you’ve described your work as embodying contradictions and multi-dimensionality. Can you unpack what these concepts mean in your practice, and how they manifest visually?
A professor once asked me, “Are you making a cultural critique, or mirroring it?”. I believe I responded “a little bit of both” but I was kind of annoyed by the question. Why can’t I do both at the same time? Art can do so much more than one thing. It can be both revealing and disguised, come from a place of truth yet full of magic, humorously poke at the line while sincerely pointing at it, or feel incredibly complex while appearing quite simple.
I like to think of the universe as a rhizome – a nonlinear web of connections & pathways full of complex subtleties where counter forces aren’t necessarily either/or, but a “this and that”. The and is important to me so I try to reflect that through my work.
In a piece I staged this summer, Fête, galante et volupté, I set out to pit opposites against each other in a durational performance set in a garden installation that resulted in three definitive sculptures. I used the actors, their tasks, and a myriad of sculptural elements to perform dichotomies like stillness v motion, object v action, luxury v labor, noun v verb, and even life v death. But I found that there’s actually movement in “stillness” – breathing, the wind, flies, decomposition, erosion.
Opposition is an energy that flows through everything, occasionally at the same time. A basketball player jumps higher if they get low first. A good dancer pushes a force downwards as they reach up to emphasize the stretch.
This kind of paradox becomes a texture for me. Maybe that’s why I gravitate to using or referring to water in my work. Water is a paradoxical element that is necessary for life but also holds the power to wash it away. It exudes both therapeutic and catastrophic qualities - sinking, floating, flooding, rising, drowning, drifting, resting, ebbing, and flowing.
Part material and compositional investigations, part temporary land art, part happening, and part photo series, “Devices Used to Stay Afloat” uses water as a visual and thematic backdrop. The post-apocalyptic forms echo icebergs, bleached coral reefs, classical columns, altered human bodies, vegetation, and machines float resiliently on a tranquil, aquatic vista.
Aesthetically, I reinforce these contradictions through the use of visual contrast to shift the perspective to bring some thing or idea into focus. Paper feels lighter and softer when it’s draped along a rough, metal surface. Saturated color pops when it’s surrounded by muddied or dull hues. A strange object will feel more out of place in a familiar setting.
Your work often evokes surrealism, fantasy, and otherworldliness. How do you approach materiality to bring these concepts to life? Are there specific materials or processes you rely on to create this sense of the fantastical?
I’m essentially making collages or assemblages, which often evoke the surreal because the usual order of things is disturbed or rearranged. The otherworldliness likely comes from my attention to scenic elements or the surroundings of my work. Additionally, the objects and figures within my work are often abject or grotesque – exaggerated, leaking or bursting at the seams.
I think there’s a comedic sensibility to the way I put materials together. The surfaces of my work are punctured, pierced, sliced, and constricted but these actions are performed like a slapstick gag. The tactile surfaces and attention-grabbing color of my sculptures appear light or clumsy whereas the figures in my videos embrace the absurd with amplified movement and theatricality. These layers are experienced with the viewer’s body and implicates our humanness (the carnal, the animalistic, the fleshy).
The cut, copy, and paste techniques I use in my work imitate division and connection where contrasting textures, colors, and references accumulate or erode. My materials and forms could be thought of as words that are combined to make phrases. The assemblages develop like a Dadaist word play or sound poem as each element is joined together in an arrangement with rhythm and rhyme.
You have such a thoughtful way of expressing your ideas about your work in writing. Do you see written language as a vital part of your artistic practice? How does it function alongside the visual elements of your work?
That’s really sweet because I actually struggle the most with language. It was always an afterthought, but I realized that can’t be avoided so I better focus on it. Freewriting and visual descriptions of my work have been helpful. Get it all out, find the gems, and remove the frivolous and passive wordings. Less is more (even if that’s not necessarily the rule I live by in my art).
My work also isn’t super straightforward, but I’m trying to use a direct, active voice as much as possible. When I read a good piece of writing, I feel it. Good writing comes from within the work itself – an outward reflection of inner interrogations of the artist’s true passions and purpose. Bad writing is applied to the work or exists as a cloud that hovers above it.
I never used text in my work until a few years ago. When I was in college, a grad student once advised that artists shouldn’t use language in their art until age 30. That was a terrible piece of advice. I lost years of practice finding my true voice because a binary was created between art and language. I still feel insecurities about my writing. At 37 I’m only now starting to feel like I’m figuring out my voice and how I want to use language.
The text-based Untitled (the world doesn’t need to hear my voice) watercolors are secret diary entries that confess fears and struggles without judgement to help make sense of myself and the world. I can let language flow without it needing to function as anything other than marks & color. Sharp lines bleed into indecipherable gestures as the pigments transform from one state to another.
How do you hope to integrate watercolor into the digital worlds you are creating? What kind of interaction or tension are you hoping to explore between them?
I hope to bring together my interest in corporal and digital bodies, landscape, sculpture, pigment, and performance residue in a new series of work. I’d like to find ways to bring some form of theatricality to my watercolor works to increase their physicality. I’m curious to see if they would integrate or clash with a digital space. Or perhaps become their own space?
My watercolors are about presence, noticing the world, and focusing on a moment. Using both accumulation and erasure, the rotation and Untitled (the world doesn’t need to hear my voice) series are daily practices of mixing and laying down pigment on wet grounds. Day after day, a rhythm is built up in each rotation piece that denotes longer cycles of spiritual focus.
Whereas, when I worked digitally, I thought about the feeling of a mind/body disconnection produced by the immersion into screens; screens as windows and mirrors; the noise and overwhelming much-ness of the internet; how the horrifying, cute, and hilarious can sit next to each other in a social media feed; the glitch as a seam or crack; magic, falseness & hyperreality; and power.
I plan to integrate the watercolor series into the digital world to come back out the other side altered in some manner as their forms are re-physicalized. This might take the form of an expansion in my paper and metal sculptural work, or digital and physical collages printed on fabric and watercolor paper to be fed back into sculptural and performative works.
I would like to think of these new works as time-based media even though they might manifest as installations, objects, or books.
How do your life experiences influence the themes you explore in your work? In what ways do your personal journey and artistic practice mirror each other?
I guess the feelings I get from living in this moment influence the themes in my work – my anxiety, confusion, being overwhelmed, but also joy and humor. Beyond that, my Untitled watercolor series is blurry for a reason!
I’ll add that my dance training has influenced the way I think about bodies and space. I still think about and occasionally refer to materials from Somatic Training and Movement Analysis classes. I also learned some useful free writing techniques from a Writing Dance Performance class.
I think limitations from my personal life affects the ways I work as well. Before grad school, I was working a fulltime desk job, so I’d come home and want to work with my hands away from a screen. Then grad school, I gravitated towards video and digital work. My work grappled with how human bodies and the physical world related to screen culture and digital spaces.
I stopped making videos and installations when I lost my studio space and felt intense screen fatigue during the COVID lockdown. After filling every nook & closet with decapitated sculptures, I vowed to only make works on paper and turned to watercolor. A few years later, watercolor has brought me back full circle to three-dimensional forms and lens-based media.
Life provides various constraints (i.e. space & time) that an artist either embraces or works to balance out!
Jan Brugger
Jan Brugger is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and administrator from the “Swiss Cheese Capital of the USA”. She stages distorted versions of reality that reflect cultural anxieties and amplify the counter forces that vibrate between everything. Her colorful formations activate the senses with attention to physicality, rhythm, and mise-en-scène.