Sculpture May/June 1996

 

 

Jef Bourgeau’s Seattle Affair

 

Video sculptor Jef Bourgeau showed his recent sculpture with San Diego’s SoMA Gallery at the February Seattle Artfair.  It was his first showing in Seattle.  The 46-year-old Michigan artist comes out of a fiction-writing, filmmaking and videography background, and was partially trained at Oakland University in Michigan. 

            Whereas better-known video sculptors like Gary Hill and Bill Viola rely on technological equipment to give their video sculpture a contemporary edge, Bourgeau is quite content to allow found objects (old wooden columns, birdhouses, glovemakers forms, chicken wire) to drag the viewer into an unreliable yet somehow comforting past, only to disrupt any ease by the insertion of tiny video monitors and tapes.

            What seems cozy and homey in Bourgeau is, as one critic observed, gradually transformed into the discomfort of the everyday, with the recognition that the past can consist of “tediously repetitive daily lives of toil.”  With the videotapes continuously repeated, the theme focuses on our own false nostalgia.  Externally reassuring, like the grain of wood on an old newel post, each sculpture explodes our expectations of the second-hand and reminds us that video technology is already a part of our lives and here to stay, whether through convenience-store surveillance or cameras now often found within apartment-building hallways. 

            Sense of Longing (1996) combined glass and found objects, in a style similar to sculptor Mary Shaffer’s approach.  Bourgeau found object, a grooved wooden newel post, is the base for a water-filled glass vase containing a transparent vinyl sleeve that is used as a screen.  With a video projector mounted behind it on a wall, the image of a man’s face on a continuously running tape seems to float in the vase.  The effect is haunting and poetic.  Perhaps punning on the notion of putting a woman on a pedestal, Bourgeau turns the tables and elevates a man’s face to an object if desire.  There is a distant whiff of late-period Marcel Duchamp here (Etants Données) with the unexpected, potentially erotic, image in the otherwise domestic setting. 

            With a record of solo exhibitions in New York, Chicago, and Amsterdam, Jef Bourgeau is an artist to watch as an alternative to Hill and Viola, someone with a command over sculpture’s material heritage who still willing to let video technology participate without dominating or whelming that heritage.

            Narrative is largely forsaken in Bourgeau’s work, but iconic power is restored in the bargain, through the frank acceptance of sculpture’s objecthood.