Jamie Brunson and Walter Robinson: Coded Language

Jamie Brunson and Walter Robinson: Coded Language explores how artists use visual imagery and color to communicate the most profound societal messages. Robinson and Brunson are two extraordinary artists from the San Francisco Bay area who have recently relocated to Santa Fe.  Both of their works have been widely exhibited and collected in private and museum collections internationally.  Currently, Robinson’s sculpture is on exhibit in Luxembourg, and Brunson recently wrapped up a museum exhibition in California. Though the two artists have been partners for several years, they do not collaborate.  In fact, both their works and the visual language they each employ are radically different from one another.

In order to communicate with the world outside their own minds, both Robinson and Brunson have created distinct visual languages unique unto themselves. Walter Robinson’s visual language is sculptural, highly political, stemming from his upbringing in a multi-lingual family that included a cryptographer during the Cold War era.  Robinson assembles visual phrases through amalgamations of found and hand hewn objects. Often, he incorporates cryptic messages in his works, using either word cross tactics, or by juxtaposing objects in a manner that frames a new view.  Robinson’s newest work, “Tumbril”, addresses current societal issues such as consumerism, expansionism, and Manifest Destiny. “Tumbril” is defined as “A farm dump cart for carrying dung; carts of this type were used to carry prisoners to the guillotine during the French Revolution.”

In “Tumbril”, the cart is another form of consumption, and the cart is empty.  The logos on the covered roof equate product placement.  The companies featured are benefitting from the exposure as the cart, buying their way into our contemporary consciousness by adding themselves to this cart’s journey.  The visual images on the patches are like logos for societal beliefs, which are marketed like actual consumable products.  Whether we buy into the beliefs or ideologies behind these images represented on the patches or not, by consuming certain products or aspects delivered to us by those ideologies, we may be consuming and literally “buying” into them involuntarily, unknowingly, or subconsciously.

Jamie Brunson’s works are two dimensional paintings of her meditative experience.  Rather than combining concrete forms into new structures (as Robinson does), Brunson uses color as her visual code.  Taking her spectrum from her Kundalini meditation practice, Jamie Brunson uses hues as her visual “words”.  A painting like “Matrix” combines hues of deep red and teal blue.  The red represents strength of emotion, while blue is the cool calm of intellect as well as serenity.  Blue and red represent the two poles of the electromagnetic spectrum of visible light.  At the low end is blue; the high end is red.  By combining these two colors in one painting, Brunson communicates the interconnectedness of all beings.