Tanya Brodsky

Tanya Brodsky and Josh Schaedel

September 9 - October 22, 2023

Left Field Gallery

TB: For several days this summer, I used the bathroom at a McDonald’s down the street. Raw sewage had bubbled up from my shower drain. Workers squeezed into the improbably small opening beneath the house and pulled up lengths of foul smelling rusted pipe. A grave-sized swath of concrete, jack hammered out of the garage, revealed more defective piping, running like veins toward the main sewer line. Disconnected from the plumbing, my bathroom fixtures reverted to a showroom display state, an image of function devoid of its essence. The Soviet children’s film, “Old Man Khotabytch” came to mind. In it, a school boy is disappointed when the eponymous genie conjures a (predictably) non-functioning solid gold payphone upon the boy’s request for a phone to call his mother.

We encountered Furniture Land + en route from the car to the lobby of the Hampton Inn where my landlord had finally agreed to put us up. The sans serif of the sign’s lettering bore a nod to European design, while its amateur kerning carried the quality of a knock off. The store projected a veneer of taste that comes with wealth. We stared at the display of faux-minimal dining room sets, lit gaudily by brass fixtures, overpriced and shoddily constructed furniture we could neither afford nor had space for. I hadn’t showered in days, was wearing a t-shirt covered in foundry wax, and shouldered my toiletries and a half bottle of whiskey in a tote bag. This is it, I said to Josh. Yes, absolutely, he agreed.

JS: On our second date we walked to get food down the street from Tanya’s studio. On the way to the taco stand, we found a bed frame which we agreed, if it was still there after lunch, should be a work. It was, and ended up in Tanya’s solo show. Years later, it was no surprise that we found the title for this show on another walk. I welcomed the staycation across from the Americana shopping mall in Glendale as both a joke and a relief from my little hobbit-house live-work space, where, around the same time, the central AC had stopped working. I don’t mind the place, even though I can touch the ceiling, and there is only one skylight for natural light: it can be great for editing photos. Piles of books clutter the space, discarded furniture from long since passed-away grandparents fill up most of the footprint, usually covered in more books, artwork, and coffee cups.

In 1989, my parents moved from a beach town to the Inland Empire, where they could afford to give us kids the kind of comforts they had grown up with. In the post Reaganomics Southern California cool version of the American dream, it’s ironic that they moved us to the desert to live among other Orange County transplants, all holding on to the same belief in a better life. The landscape grew up with me. Our neighborhood of cookie-cutter McMansions felt like a scene out of “Edward Scissorhands,” with friends’ homes featuring similar floor plans, filled with similar furniture to hold the weight of similar modern lives. Every morning, my stepfather pulled out of the driveway on his way to sell sprinklers and palm trees to developers.

My friends and I who got out of the IE swap tales of survival like war buddies, except that we escaped the trappings of a constructed fantasy that had been sold to our parents. However, I know this to be not entirely true: you don’t escape capitalism, it evolves into new forms. When I see the windows of box stores that line every boulevard in America, wrapped with photographs of an idealized contemporary life, I am reminded of why I left home. Like our stay at the Americana, Tanya and I often find ourselves vacationing in suburban areas, their quiet streets and tract homes similar to the town I grew up in. Sometimes we feel like aliens zooming in to see how the humans are getting along these days.

A collaboration between Pieter Performance Space and The Box, Knees, Schools, Urges is a performance program and exhibition which invites ten dancers / artists to grapple with documented and undocumented histories of early 20th century modern dance in the place now known as Los Angeles. An examination of the absence of archived history of dance and dancers in the region, and the undersung work that historically minoritized artists have done in the field, the project looks both forward and backward, approaching the timeframe of the exhibition as an opportunity to document and create an archive which acknowledges the value of short-term local history as an ongoing project for present and future generations.

The Box, Los Angeles, 2022

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Milka Djordjevich, Sebastian Hernandez, Jmy James Kidd, taisha paggett, Tanya Brodsky, Jessa Calderon, Neha Choksi, Alison D’Amato, iris yirei hu, & Peter Hernàndez

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Curator, Jennie MaryTai Liu

Assistant Curator, Alana Frey

Producer, Pieter Performance Space

Test Site Projects, Las Vegas, NV

June 11 - July 17, 2022

How to make friends

How to talk to strangers

How to wire an LED cob chip

How to get away with murder - American television show

How to etch a circuit board

How to make time

How to make

How to write

How to draw

How to play

How to kiss

How to get

How to do

“We had bought into Silicon Valley’s promise of a frictionless society.” writes Nicole Perlroth in This is How They Tell Me The World Ends.

“So you can human again,” goes the Roomba vacuum cleaner ad.

There is a vague promise of time gained, or at least subdivided into graspable moments, synchronized between the coffee machine and the sprinkler. Slick displays blink to life, displaying a time set by the user or via WiFi, before, succumbing to their planned obsolescence, their plastic carapaces merge with the geological time of the landfill. The texture of time returned by technology feels more jagged, frenetic. I forget how to be bored in the way that I once used to be.

When the power goes out, the gestures of interaction between organic and electronic bodies take on the aura of ritual. The user manuals for devices I no longer own become a score for solitary movement. Hold down the button for three seconds, swipe left, place your finger flat on the sensor surface. “Language is always and everywhere language,” sang Momus back in 1987.

My ex-Soviet engineer father spends his time jerry-rigging his retirement home to perform automatic tasks. A pump placed in the toilet tank and a grow light, bolted to a home-made heat sink, keep his house plants alive when he leaves town. Why don’t you just have the neighbors stop by? That’s not the point, he says. When his cat died, he called and spoke to me for an hour and a half about the workings of his modem. When my cat was dying, we discussed a mis-wiring in one of my sculptures with piqued urgency.

There are no foundries in Nevada, a legal holdover from its mob days, to keep people from minting their own casino chips, now made out of a compressed chalk substance akin to kitty litter. A rare adherence to authenticity, in a city built on simulacra. Is the value of an editioned object contained in our agreement to not produce more of it?

Installation view, The Magic Hour 6: Antonia Kuo, Rachelle Rojany, Tanya Brodsky. The Magic Hour, Twentynine Palms, CA

Solo exhibition, Ochi Projects, Los Angeles, 2019

Writing from exile in Switzerland in the winter of 1919, avant-garde Ballet Russes dancer Vaslav Nijinsky chronicled his descent into schizophrenia through a progressively dissociative relationship to language:

I want to tell you
That you want to sleep sleep sleep.
I do not want want to sleep
You do not want want to sleep.
I will go and shit with you
You are to shi but I am not to shi.
I am not sha ming sha ming shi.
Shi shi shi shi shi

There is a gap between language and meaning, like that between a map and a road. It’s possible to pick up the wrong map and not realize it until the third or fourth discrepancy occurs, the first or second dismissed as a cartographer’s error. Migration uproots psycho-geography, re-mapping one terrain onto another. During my first months in the U.S., I read the backwards R in the Toys R Us logo as the Russian я (ya), meaning I. Toys I, Us: I am toys, as are we all. This mistranslation between self-description and global pronouncement is a very Soviet mistake.

The inability to communicate clearly can be described as feeling walled in. The buildings we construct act as containers for bodies, and in them we learn where to tip-toe, when to slam doors, what to throw out the window, how much the neighbors can hear. A fortochka is an untranslatable Russian term for a small ventilation hatch, inset within a larger casement window. A standard feature in Eastern European homes, it is designed to release the stale interior air of a room without letting in too much of the exterior cold, or the bodies of would-be intruders. It is sized ideally for drying a pair of socks, for protruding a cigarette-holding hand, for cooling baked goods, for the occasional entry of small birds.

Kaiser Permanente sends me generic nature stock photos, accompanied by recommendations for something called “forest bathing.” In a blur of communication and advertising, image and text are flattened, co-opted, coded, re-coded, and ultimately digested, leaving behind traces of mutated half-meanings. The eye’s focus oscillates between looking through, and looking at: a scattering of sight and attention, a breaking apart of the singular. When I saw an ad stating that the Behr Paint color of the year is a green hue called Back to Nature, all I could think was, damn the 90’s really are back. Sometimes, I want to yell emojis across the room. Bears do supposedly still shit in the woods, though.

Temporary public installation presented as part of Materials & Applications summer program, Privacies Infrastructure.

Solo exhibition, Ochi Projects, Los Angeles, 2017

Installation images: Jeff McLane, Individual images: Josh Schaedel

Mixed feelings like mixed nuts, a grab bag of options when you already know which one you’d want. Or maybe the labeling is intentionally misleading, and a slinky-snake jumps out of the can when you open it. Sometimes life punches you in the face.

New meaning is revealed as language pivots (it doesn’t matter which side of the door you’re on, if it isn’t attached to a wall). How much deconstruction can an object sustain before it ceases to be itself? And is meaning always between the lines, an intangible miasma made manifest through our collective belief?

There is that jolt of clarity when you trip and lose your balance, but catch yourself just before hitting the ground. A kaleidoscopic de-coupling and re-coupling of meaning and form: backing a car into a fence can reveal a fluidity of form concealed within the properly functioning object.

A wrought iron fence, bars on the windows, bars on the headboard – all demarcations of boundaries, objects bearing a force of suggestion. Steel bars signal simultaneously the safety of those within and the maleficence of those without. Zillow recommends the removal of security bars from windows prior to putting your house on the market.

But getting back to beds, are metal slats purely a thing you grip on to? A titillating nod to imprisonment? A counterpoint to the softness of the bedding, of the flesh? A sock on the doorknob means don’t come in.

As a child in Soviet Ukraine, I felt guilty and ashamed of my longing for the spiritual comforts of the Eastern Orthodox Church, with its endless beeswax candles, incense, and incantations. This only doubled my guilt and shame over masturbating quite so much, since neither the Church nor polite secular society would approve.

Sincerity can be embarrassing, impolite.

Installation view Bright Resolutions: Tanya Brodsky, Jonathan Chapline, Megan Stroech, CES Gallery, Los Angeles, 2016

Installation view In a crush, yet not resentful, solo exhibition, Visitor Welcome Center gallery, Los Angeles 2016

S-Picture two workmen on the side of the road; one is digging a hole in the ground, the other is filling it back in with dirt at the same pace-

O-Wait, are you telling me a joke

S- Is that a question? I don’t see the question mark.

O-I didn’t know you were telling a joke, I was trying to situate myself.

S- Yeah, I didn’t feel the need to explain what I was doing, but I like where this is going.

O- I’m still in need of a punch line.

S- Perhaps you’ll get one. What is fascinating now is the absence of (?) something that is both a question and a mark, how a curved line with a period signifies a response.

O- I’m thinking traffic cones, yellow tape, large puddles and jack hammers!

S- Yes, how easy it is to get diverted, but how do you remain relevant?

O- I tend to surround myself with intelligent people.

S- Sounds like you are still on the outside.

O- Well, you are either in or you are out, so I focus on the perimeter.

S- You ever try hopping over that fence?

O- Of course, it’s not the physical space on the other side that is hard to access, it’s the charisma, making shit look easy, holding non-chalantness like it’s a fucking newborn!

S- Mind and body games, filling the holes, sealing the cracks!

O-Janitorial work, the mind has a lot of locks, but it also has a belt full of keys-jingle jingle. The problem are the words--DO NOT DUPLICATE--written all over things we’re trying to share.

S-Locksmiths will just ignore that most of the time. It’s called slippage.

O- Slippage?

S- You ever find a pair of underwear in your bedroom and not know who it belonged to?

O- Ah yes, I see, Laundromats, misplacing our under garments, accidentally tossing away our intimate spaces to strangers.

S- I’m talking clothes lines outside of apartment blocs! Hanging that shit out in the open, and beating the dust off our rugs in public!

O- I think I got the punch line.

S- Do you?

O- Yeah, the guy whose job it is to stick the post in the ground never showed up; that’s why one person fills the hole at the same pace as the other one digs it.

Installation view In/Ex, Actual Size gallery, Los Angeles, 2016

Public art installation created for the City of West Hollywood’s Art on the Outside Commission, curated by Aurora Tang.

This installation presents a dynamic collection of sculptural elements that interplay with one another, engaging nearly the entire “front porch” of the Community Center at Plummer Park. It consists of several large-scale sculptures that, in their playful form and bright color, evoke a children’s playground, of the kind ubiquitous during the Soviet era. The sculptures don’t quite work as playground equipment: each one is too tall, too short, missing key elements, or installed at an absurd relationship to the one next to it. The installation’s title, Yolki Palki, is a Russian nonsense phrase expressing frustration or alarm, commonly used in lieu of a curse word in the presence of children.

Installation view Friends & Family, MFA Thesis exhibition, Main gallery, UCSD, 2016

Installation view 7) SPF 15: Tanya Brodsky, Sofia Londoño, Ellen Schafer, SPF 15 Exhibitions, San Diego, 2016

Unique artist book, gouache, acrylic and ink on frosted Mylar, 2015