Boston artist Brynn Dizack was nearly halfway done with “madeline,” a conceptual piece made ofhand cast cement bottles, when we met. She had finished almost a thousand, but needed more than double that amount to reach the 2,280 bottles intended for the piece’s final number, based on an ex-partner’s beer consumption rate during the course of their relationship: four to five bottles per day over the span of just under two years. Dizack fills each empty glass bottle with cement and, once it’s dry, cracks and peels away the glass from its chalky, bottle-shaped interior, sacrificing the manmade glass for its dense artist-made counterpart.
All of her work has this same kind of careful
obsessiveness about it — important ideas hidden
in earth tones and everyday materials like sugar,
thread, paper and concrete. Dizack’s works come
from a rejection of this millennium’s technological
obsession, coming back to physicality and a sense
of heaviness — both in meaning and material. Her
other works include “passage,” a poem that extends
from the ceiling to the floor in the artist’s own
handwriting, hand-cut from a piece of Mylar that casts
white words against a white wall, and “revision,” a
grid of pages sliced from a found book, with much
of the text blacked out to reveal new sentences and
sentiments. These works are part of “canis major,”
Dizack’s first solo show, which is on view through
March 15 at Milton Academy’s Nesto Gallery.
The show is titled after a constellation of the same
name. The most important trait of the Big Dog is
generally thought to be indicated by the brightest
star in our sky, Sirius, but there are discrepancies
in how different diagrams determine which part of
the dog it represents — it could be the dog’s nose,
his jaw or his heart. Dizack’s work provides for this
kind of open interpretation, conceptual pieces that
push viewers to examine their own immediate and
visceral reactions. The mass of bottles that make up
“madeline” are rooted in the far right side of the
gallery and move out organically, a reminder of what
Dizack called, “the physical and emotional weight of
the things we consume.”
Another wall is sprinkled in pinpoints and string
creating abstract, geometrical shapes — or
constellations. This series is titled distillations whose
shapes show interpretations of Dizack’s daily routes,
mapping her travels from destination to destination.
In some, she superimposes her partner’s daily route
on top of her own — two paths moving independently
of one another or crisscrossing until meeting.
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