Threshold: When the Wild Wears You
An Exhibition at Vintage Berkeley Wine Shop

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“J. Braman’s most recent body of work is based on an imagined group of beings she calls Gatherers. In starting with the idea that bodies are sites where stories begin, Braman’s work uses figuration to explore nonlinear storytelling. A sense of crossing - the artist calls it “leaping” - is built into her world-building through techniques that include working with her non-dominant hand, using ink on a slow-drying resistant surface (Yupo paper), and combining text with pictorial imagery.”
-Amy Spencer, Curator, Richmond Art Center

In my art, I am pushing against what I am allowed, what I know. Every mark is an act of radical presence. Most marks are made with my non-dominant left hand.  I use my left hand because I am able to bypass the artistic training that makes my right-handed marks self-conscious. I already know what my right hand will tell me, but I cannot predict how the left hand will act, and the purpose of this work is to reveal the hidden. 

My work seeks to create a language of the body coming into being, a visual interruption of our expectations of body, self, and culture. My work (both the making of the drawing and the final product) is a verbal and visual wearing of the thresholds between the sacred and the mundane, and relies on repetition, disclosure, accumulation, misinformation, and masquerade. It is a carnivalesque language of the body. I try to push the use of text, scale, refinement, and access, to track transitions - actions, impulses, reflections - across a boundary of self.  I want to leave the social intellect and empower another place from which to speak the fullness of our physical body into being.