Imelda, 62" x 12" x 16"

Joe Brubaker

Assembled Souls, an exhibition of fantastic wood and mixed media figures by Joe Brubaker is the October 2008 exhibition. It coincides with the release of Somnambulists, a hard-bound limited edition book, chronisling Brubaker's career and creative process. A limited edition boxed book with an original drawing included will also be available.

The wooden carved figures of Joe Brubaker have often echoed sources of inspiration from Spanish colonial Santos of retablo objects to Egyptian tomb figure and Buddhist stone carvings. In these recent works, Brubaker has gone beyond these early influences, crossing cultures on an even broader basis. He has included forms reminiscent of ritual costumes and body decorations from indigenous peoples all over the world. Incorporating scraps of metal and found materials, he has created a cast of characters that are at once strikingly universal and absolutely unique. The work might be compared to that of Stephen de Staebler in the sense that the figures seem to rise out of stockpiles of body parts, but in Brubaker's case, the body parts are not cast, but may have once been pieces of hardward or beautifully aged beach wood. For Brubaker, there is a moment when the work takes on its own personality. "I almost imagine myself as channeling some soul that's out there and wants to come back", he says. "It's really sometimes an eerie moment." They become Brubaker's own iconographic symbols of peoples throughout time, struggling to build and remake themselves out of the materials at hand. Because they are figures, we relate instinctively to the works in a physical way, feeling a kinship with the reach of the arms or the forward tilt of the body. The sculptures also have abstract qualities that enable us to travel through the sensations of shape, color and texture the way we would when experiencing a complex and masterful abstract work.