Featured Artist: Elisha Brockenberry

Young Bridgeport artist Elisha Brockenberry lives in the world of becoming. This is reflected in her art-making, the choice of found objects that she incorporates into her work, her process, and her passion for urban farming. (During the pandemic shutdown she appropriated an unstewarded patch of a community garden that became a haven for creating and gathering for local youth.) Her understanding and fascination for the biology of flux is combined with her musings and preoccupation with the connection between the astral present, past and future and wonder of her ancestral roots. She is a picker of stuff. She admires the design, potential and intrinsic qualities of found detritus. Elisha has a Puck-like nature, she pushes boundaries and doesn’t accept things or situations as conventionally established. She plays with symbolism and ‘reality’ and challenges the viewer with intimate subject matter or illogical pairings like a hammer and fabric epoxied onto large flat charcoal-black board of insulation that she found in a dumpster outside her studio space at the NEST Arts Factory.

Elisha experimented with installation for Bridgeport Art Trail at the 211 State St. Pop Up. In a recent show,
"Woe and Whimsy" at City Lights, Elisha exhibited an assemblage that was primarily a painting, with a Dali-esque surrealism. Light blue painting of drapery transitions to a patch of sky, then to a tear. She also includes an actual piece of fabric to further exploit the tension between reality and conceptual. She plays with portraiture: painted, collaged, and missing from where the viewer would conventionally ‘expect’ a face to be. Recent works are on view in the exhibit FACES at City Lights Gallery and in the exhibit at the NEST Arts factory, “Black Art in America” a nonrestrictive history of Black art in Bridgeport and beyond. Both group exhibits will run through the month of February.

Like other artists when they are in their astral art-making process, she assumes the role of the channel through which truths and beauty are manifested into art. She as well as other artists admit that at the moment of creation and perhaps for some time afterwards, the meaning of the artwork may not be apparent; but she knows in her soul that the art is true and relevant. For some artists, including the author of this article, it can be years before the ‘meaning’ of a piece is realized.

Flashbacks of seeing Louise Nevelson rummage through a discarded wood pile in SoHo appear while discussing with Elisha this work on view in FACES. A crushed piece of metal substitutes the ear on the portrait. Elisha found a fleck of litter while on a walk. For Elisha she found it and saw it as an ear before it was an ear. It reads as an ear on the side of the subject’s head. Her approach to artmaking is echoed in her everyday apparel. One never knows what or how she will wear or upcycle clothing. This is how Elisha sees and walks through her life. Her becoming is full of potential.

Review by Suzanne Kachmar, these insights were mostly collected while Elisha sat as a model for portrait painitng, visiting her studio, and discussing her work as a fellow tenant at the Nest Arts Factory.

Follow Elisha at @righteouspath.2002 on Instagram