23 Jul 2018

Elaine Bradford and Sara Cress: Routine Fables

Lawndale Art Center

Reviewed by Renata Lucia

The "Routine Fables" collaboration consists of 52 weekly "sculpture poems" by Sara Cress and Elaine Bradford. Bradford's surprising and sometimes humorous juxtapositions of crochet, ceramics, and found objects form intimate figures, often with elongated limbs and obscured heads. Cress's poems, created in response to each sculpture, abut them in imperfect cursive on the gallery walls. The poems lend emotional heft and amplify darker content with lyric references to daily struggles, such as surviving Hurricane Harvey, the death of a pet, sexual harassment, and navigating a changing country. A timeline drawn below the works poignantly places them within the personal and political landscape the two Houstonians traversed in 2017.

Father Time (2017) manifests the weight of a difficult year scrutinized in minutes and seconds, while adding palpable "anchors to your undereyes," as Cress puts it. Perseverance and the catharsis of sharing are on display: "I have this bruise, it matches yours!"