Sleeping Out Summer Night

Sarah Braman’s assemblages conjure new and unexpected poetry from the most mundane found objects. Combining elements from scrapped vehicles, old buildings, or antique furniture with translucent volumes of colour and light, Braman works in a visual vocabulary distinguished by her elegant sleight of hand and keen eye for delicate emotional resonance. She explains that ‘a lot of the time it starts with furniture that’s around the house, or stuff I see when I’m driving around that’s on the side of the road. We live in Amherst, Massachusetts, so in the early spring when the students move out there’s always a bunch of junk along the road when they’re leaving their dorms and apartments.’ In Sleeping Out Summer Night, the hood of a truck balances at an angle between a cornered sheet of clear Plexiglas and a section of plywood crate; an old radio is fixed to its roof, and brief skeins of purple spraypaint seem to hold everything together. A swathe of patterned fabric is draped over the Plexiglas, echoing the truck’s metallic red paintjob. In concert with its evocative title, this makeshift gathering suggests an off-kilter junkyard romanticism, perhaps a night spent under the stars listening to the airwaves: the work gestures at themes of shelter, home, and nature, eulogising the everyday physical experience of a lived environment.