By FRANKLIN W. LIU
Artscope Nov/Dec 2010
"PLACES OF THE HEART: Prilla Smith Brackett" Hess Gallery, Pine Manor College, Chestnut Hill, MA
Mixed media artist Prilla Smith Brackett intends her
translucent, conceptual landscape images to be anything but a
literal delineation of a familiar place. This show, which contains
28 of her artworks, is an ephemeral invitation for viewers to
indulge in their own contemplation; her contextual narrative
is revealingly personal, yet universal in appeal.
In her forests: trees, copse, boles split by lightning,
saplings and coarse woody debris strewn about — they are
primordial, pristine and pure. Some would say old growth
forests are greater than any cathedral in its homage to God.
“Forests are places of hidden secrets, of solace and spirituality,
of make-believe,” Brackett said. “I hope to create spaces
where the imagination can wander and memories can
surface.”
Generations come and go, while these magnificent trees
stand, rooted, bearing silent witness to humanity’s progress
and, also, to our collusive encroachment and disregard for
inducing environmental travesties. Due to this disregard, an
activist’s prominent drumbeat has reverberated in Brackett’s
work for the last 15 years.
Nowadays, drawing from this cautionary tale and from a
childhood spent wide-eyed, exploring the woods, the images of
New England forest landscape continue to dominate as her subject matter. The natural landscape
images in her mixed media work come from photographs she snapped while on an extended solo
hiking trip to the Big Reed Reserve in the White Mountains in northern Maine in 1995. She further
embeds and superimposes images of furniture salvaged from the sale of her ancestral home in
Duxbury, Massachusetts; they brim with 90 years of generational memories for her.
Brackett’s personal vocabulary poignantly reflects that which has come from the forest, with
passing time, shall return to the forest — that all things physical and spiritual shall reunite.
Within the landscape envelope, the images and the scale of these cherished furnishings are
placed much like an overlaying pattern, so their dysphoric symbolism is clear — they sit, lean and
hover; sometimes outlined, sometimes opaque, at times translucent, thus disappearing into the
forest like ghostly images. She alludes to an antique rocking chair, bed and bureau as characters in
her narrative that intrude into the primordial forest setting as revenant icons: a disquietude
contrasting what is man-made with what is natural.
Brackett, whose work can be found in several local college collections as well as the National
Museum of Women in the Arts, wants her viewers to ponder what immanent and harvested
interconnections exist in their own life, and to consider what community action should take place to
protect and to preserve the environment.
Her monoprints and mixed-media panels vary in size. They range from a small 19¾” X 22¼” to
a large sixpanel piece, “Family Patterns #8,” measuring 9 feet high by 8 feet wide. She often uses a
combination of acrylic wash, graphite, conté, charcoal, oil pastel and collaged paper on panels. In this
richly textured piece, a wide section of a blown-down tree with protruding branches takes on the
appearance of the tentacles of a monstrous insect. They serve to make the point, Brackett said, that
“Forests are scary places on the edge of civilization.”
For this reviewer, “Places of the Heart” is about the air we breathe, the soil we till, the trees,
the horizon and what we think of life itself.
© Franklin W. Liu, 2010