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Feb 24 - March 3, 2002 |
The truth beneath skin
Silvana Bruni's work reveals a personal voyage
By Jennifer Febbraro
Originally Published: 2002-02-03
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"Riding it, backwards and in costume"
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Up around the corner from the Queen Street art buzz, one block north on Ossington and up a humble flight of stairs, resides a small cesspool of talent. This month Italian-Canadian Silvana Bruni, a Toronto-based mixed media artist, is occupying the fortress and the magical pieces held within almost send a tangible glow out onto the streets below.
Silvana Bruni is caught in a happy balance of talents. Dividing her time equally between drumming for The Great Forgetting along with fellow musicians Paul Schedlich and Ravi Khajuria, and creating mixed media works - one on drum skins and the other series on glass, Bruni has co-ordinated a crop rotation style of artistic living, keeping everything fresh in the process. With each discipline feeding and nurturing inspiration for the other, rhythm often appears in the art and the themes of the art in the music.
What makes her unique is her achievement of an authentic union between the two. Bruni describes the epiphany of 'seeing' images in the drumskins as a "relief": "It was always a challenge to not let one art take over, but that day when I saw there were images in the skins, I realized that I had been drawing all along." After the skins wore too thin for a productive sound, she would take the skins and begin creating with what remained.
With the initial suggestion of marks, Bruni improvises with the textures, adding figures or simply linking the already existent shapes within. Fish, erupting volcanoes, horses running wild, the flames from a fire, all broke out of the aggression of playing. Where the music from the post-punk/indie rock practices leave off, the language of the visual begins. The power of this expression lies in the creativity of Bruni's vision, for it takes a special eye to see the beauty in what thousands of other drummers merely throw in the trash.
Herbarium, her current exhibition at A.W.O.L. Gallery, showcases both her drumskin series as well as her paintings on glass. But unlike the more unconscious beginnings of the skins' work, the paintings on glass begin from what Bruni calls "personal sublime moments" where a memory or realization surfaces and demands to be spoken.
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