Process

The Gulf of Pandemonium

1991
Assemblage with cast concrete and motor oil
7 x 59 x 65 inches
Black oil in center appear as a foreboding portal to dark depths.
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This piece was constructed around the portal of an ancient safe that I purchased from a local scrap yard. I paid the employees $20 to cut it open with a torch after clarifying that any booty inside was mine, of course. Filling the inner chamber with black oil produced the illusion of a hellhole—an abyss of endless black, extending into the earth, but not without a potential moor. As Sandra Goldman put it, “A heavy chain has been dropped into the well and like an anchor that falls to a distant sea floor, its destiny is unknown.” Surprisingly, adults will dip a finger in, and invariably wipe it off on the piece. Children are more thoughtful, possibly due to the fear factor. And cats…hmmm, cats.

BRUDNIAK

Pandemonium suggests a wildly lawless or a riotous place like hell. Pandora from Greek mythology was the first woman on earth. It was she who opened the box from which all of the world’s evils escaped. Only hope remained in the box. This large floor piece made with the door jam of an old safe has cement steps leading up to a pool of dark liquid. Chains are attached to the base and look as if that they were found in a dungeon. Looking into the pool can give the viewer a feeling of being sucked into a bottomless pit. Is Brudniak’s nightmare that the demons of his mind will rise up through the opening and destroy him?

PAUL HARRIS – Personal Anxieties, Dysfunction and Spiritual Dilemmas

The Gulf of Pandemonium, a rectangular well of slippery black oil, is surrounded by cast-concrete steps and a large platform; the well is small enough to induce a sense of claustrophobia. Chains arranged carelessly on the steps ignite our fears. Brudniak achieves a powerful, exquisite range not only with real objects—how easy to slip into the trap, how difficult to climb out — but with illusions, whose most potent effects are created not in the gallery, but in the internal world that each of us inhibits.

ELIZABETH MCBRIDE – Art News