Procession (ante) 2021

Folded paper, adhesive, pins in drywall.

Procession (ante) marks Bruce’s preliminary departure from canvas-based collage to room-based installations. The work is comprised of over 100 folded paper-butterflies using pages torn from the biblical reference text, Who’s Who in the Bible, 1993.

The repeated butterfly motif, constructed from religious imagery and text, fuses ideas of influence, inheritance and identity with those of path, free will, and expression. Bruce traces his own painful experiences from childhood, and his journey from them, with the flight path of butterflies frozen in time. Bruce sees this installation as the observing of a single point in time, an opportunity to consider that which is usually surrounded in movement and elusiveness.

Bruce’s initial install, on the wall in his rental house during the pandemic, serves as a testament to his own journey and the amount of time spent in such a space. There exists an anxiety in the piece that mirrors the tensions of life in quarantine, as the winged figures, capable of flight, are immobilized and rendered in a harsh, singular light. Bruce, in response to his own feelings of entrapment, created a moment of expression both inundating in its process and freeing in its composition.

Procession (ante) served as a critical turning point in Bruce’s practice as the installation work that followed compounded on these ideas of space, volume, and freedom.