Ricardo Brey: Chinese Purple

Alder & Co., 222 Main Street, Germantown NY 12526

Hours: Friday – Sunday 11:00 AM – 6:00 PM

Inviting performative engagement by unclasping the four walls of the box and unfolding them to reveal a complex web of symbols, Brey’s archival boxes from his series Every Life is a Fire symbolize the vast unknowable intricacies of the human mind. In Chinese Purple, five nesting boxes unfurl like a Russian Matryoshka doll, alluding to layers of secrets. Each side of each box is lined with delicate paper bearing ornamental Baroque-inspired patterns, rendered in deep red hues borrowed from antique Chinese lacquered furniture. The centerpiece of the box is a small accordion-style booklet delicately wrapped in a gilded textile fragment from a sari, which rests on a bed of dried rosebuds within a glass cube. Juxtaposing scientific renderings of the human heart, oxidized gold leaf, and citations from Manichean texts, Brey alludes to the inherent tensions between binary concepts like life and death, dreams and nightmares, masculinity and femininity, black and white, and the manmade and organic. Through the appropriation of diverse found materials, Brey also hints at the history of Europe's spice trade and legacies of colonialism. Reflecting on the work’s symbolic potential, Brey states, “The box is our head, the box is our cave, the box is the attic, the box is the memory and the world. The boxes are an attempt to spatially represent… a hermeneutics of the soul to create a topography of the mind.”