You and I, we've got the same blood running through us
by Alexander Kucharski
Exhibition words for You and I, we've got the same blood running through us at Cut Thumb Ari, September 2016.
Bridie Gillman did not meet her father until she was seventeen.
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I hadn’t thought, to that point, that my relationship with my father was at all important to me. I had terminated it reasonably. But my unexpected torrent of grief at the conclusion of the story of that dysfunctional family made me realize that I couldn’t bear the thought of not mending the relationship before it was too late. I don’t remember many moments of crystal clear certainty in my life and that is a realization that I do not regret.
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This exhibition is less an autobiography than it is revisionist history.
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It’s tough to keep the personal from becoming kitsch. Placing one’s experiences above those of a sea of less interesting admirers carries little clout among the cultural elite. One way to prevent the transition is to blend the personal with overt, but not too overt, signifiers of self-awareness. However, this self-congratulatory sincerity suffers the same problem and quickly reads as kitsch as discerning viewers oscillate towards having their honest and banal experiences derided, rather than disregarded. To observe a lactose-free modernity, to remove the cheese, so to speak, the personal must become the impersonal, speaking relatably and with deference to the multiplicity of personalities, and need not have even been truly experienced as much as it can be thought to have. Perhaps the most relatable experience is one constructed in good faith that is knowingly untrue.
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The elements of the exhibition are real family objects and references.
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The white car
The blue car
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The resulting artworks and their relatable situations and symbols kindly and humorously inspect what is often taken for granted about family relationships.
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Most things are bizarre when you look at them too closely. Especially uncles. Not known for their good breath, manners, looks, or taste, uncles are in fact interchangeable with most men around your father’s age whom you only see because it’s traditional. Occasionally, though, a sharp one pops along and gives you your first Yes CD, before calmly slipping back into the folds of fundamentalist Christianity, afraid that the devil causes all of the bad things to happen, as well as probably most of the good things, fooling you into believing he doesn’t exist.
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Gillman’s practice largely deals with cross-cultural experiences and the in-between, here nodded to by her position regarding her theretofore unknown relatives in video work You and I, we've got the same blood running through us, her then unknown parental interactions in My mother's words, her paintings from an imaginary childhood, and her installations built from repurposed scraps from an ancestral shed.
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The feeling is best described as Sehnsucht, the German concept of life’s longings. Knowing imperfection and nostalgia for a utopia that never existed, coupled with the temperature of neither happiness nor sadness, but acceptance. Do these compositions achieve something in their result, or is the process their more beautiful aspect? Reassembling the unknown into new forms challenges the constancy of experience, creating meaning where perhaps none existed in the first place. At the very least, the emotion is transferable from artist to viewer, the intangibility of familial relationships in its sights.
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“Muuuuum, which car are we taking?”
