On Speaking Terms

The first series, in collaboration with my indentical twin, Lee Lee Brazeal

This series began the way most of our collaborations do, with a stack of surfaces LeeLee had set aside. Pieces she had worked into and walked away from. To her they were finished , rejected, resolved by being released. To me they were beginnings. I started cutting them apart, regridding them, layering my own marks over hers, and somewhere in that process, the work began to talk back.

What I heard in it was language. Not vocabulary exactly. Something more like texture of speech. The way a conversations pile up and contradict each other. The way certain things slip out and cannot be taken back. The way silence can be louder than what is said. Each painting in the series carries a phrase as a title (Whispers, You Can’t Unsay That, The Conversation Got Louder, Things You Say in the Dark, fragments of how we actually talk to each other, and over each other, and through each other.

The work itself looks like writing in a language I do not quite know. White marks sweep across the gridlike calligraphy without an alphabet: drips, scribbles, gestures that resolve into something declaring attention, then dissolve again. The grid is the page; her marks and mine are the script. A Language I Never Heard Before, with its red and black field cut by white strokes, feels like an argument overheard through a wall: emphatic, fragmented, urgent. But also tender, the way a real argument between people who love each other always is.

That intimacy is what makes the work possible. LeeLee and I have been each other’s first audience, first critic, and first confidant since before we could speak. There is no rejected fragment of hers I will not pick up, and no risk I will not take with her marks, because the trust settled long before the painting started. What you are seeing in this series is two voices that have been talking their whole lives, sometimes finishing each other’s sentences, sometimes interrupting, somtimes sawing the same thing at the same time without meaning, converging into a single resolved form.