Finding his groove

Asa Brebner’s many facets on display at the Paradise

By Susie Davidson

CORRESPONDENT

At February’s Between a Rock and an Art Place exhibit at the Zeitgeist gallery, a long vertical panel entitled “Progress” depicted, in a three-dimensional collage of mainly found objects, the history of mankind, beginning with dinosaurs and winding down a train track through provocative scenes including Wild West shoot-em-ups and the gates of Auschwitz, ending at the Sept. 11 plane crashes into the World Trade Center. Another panel, called “the Tomb of a Modern Prince,” portrayed a skeleton lying amid toys and debris.

“But there is also some humor among the darkness,” assured the artist, Asa Brebner, whose solo show, “Manifestations of the Discarded,” will run May 22-June 25 at the Paradise Lounge in Boston, with tomorrow’s opening reception to feature a live performance by Brebner’s band Idle Hands. The Paradise, in its 25^th anniversary year, began exhibiting shows last November with “Infections,” the work of former Weezer bassist Mikey Welch.

Brebner’s previous show, 2000’s “Apocalypse Lite,” ran at the Middle East; his cartoons have appeared in High Times and other magazines. But the Cambridge resident of 15 years, the past seven as a Porter Square homeowner, is perhaps best known for his guitar work as a founding member of Robin Lane and the Chartbusters, as well as in Jonathan Richman’s Modern Lovers, his own Idle Hands, varied other ensembles, four solo LPs and his myriad local musical production.

But he’s also created visual art for the past three decades, calling it “another side of the same coin.” He regards playing music as basically a cathartic form of performance art in a sort of human sacrifice, visual art as more relaxed and introspective. “You don’t need three or four dysfunctional partners to help put it across,” he quipped. Though his medium and finished product can be viewed as undeniably outre, the influences of both his early years as well as world events are reflected in his work, which he views as didactic, as defined by Joseph Campbell. “It relates to things outside of it,” he said, explaining that he tried static, Campbell’s other, more art-for-art’s-sake classification, but inevitably, “corruption crept in.”

Brebner, born in 1953 in Marblehead, attended the Quaker Meeting School in Rindge, New Hampshire, and studied painting and woodworking. “I don’t think geometrically, so I became an artist rather than a cabinet maker,” he said, stressing the endurance of those years. “Almost all we do relates to what we first loved about the world,” he said. “We are trapped in our histories.” (This, he believes, is a neutral quality.)

Following a year spent in South America, where he spent six months in an Ecuadorean jail for marijuana possession, he migrated to Cambridge, joining the Corners of Mouth commune, where many of his Meeting School classmates were living. Housed in an apartment building along with a bakery, healthfood store and restaurant, now the site of the triangular-shaped park in Inman Square, it was gutted by fire in the mid 70s during a time of increased arson incidence in the city.

“That was where I started playing music and doing art,” Brebner recalled, noting that many of its residents, including classmate and artistic influence Robert Burden, who succumbed to AIDS in 1989, were deceased. “It was a hotbed of intellectual and artistic ideas,” he recalled.

He shares his Inman Square studio, located underneath the Zeitgeist, with fellow artist/musician Wayne Viens, whose fabric sculpture at the Paradise show will complement Brebner’s riotous renaissance of sculpture, sketches and paintings. A multidimensional hunter and collector of toys, dolls and objects of metal, wood and plastic, he uses caulk, paint and adhesive to fuse thought and technique onto wooden planks, metal sheets and canvases. The hues of his paintings vibrantly reflect current events and political themes; his sculpted guitars depict music as a muse, hostage, hero and also, noose. Ecology, economy, psychology, cynicism, emotion, philosophy all emerge, in both abstract and literal terminology.

Brebner influences range from Goya, Bosch and Breughel to Gaugin, Henri Rousseau, Dali, Ives Tanguy, Paul Klee, Joan Miro and Hans Belmer, all artistic renegades, and he deeply identifies with 60s icon R. Crumb. Yet underneath it all, Brebner professes conformity.

“I’m just trying to be an artist, get work exhibited and hopefully sold,” he said.

Manifestations Of The Discarded: Three Dimensional Sculpture and Paintings by Asa Brebner, sponsored by the Paradise Lounge and Out of the Blue Gallery, will run May 22 through June 25 at the Paradise, 969 Commonwealth Ave., Boston. Tomorrow (May 22)’s opening reception, presented by Stuff At Night Magazine, will be held from 7-9 p.m. and feature a live performance by Asa Brebner’s Idle Hands. Brebner and Viens will be in attendance; all artwork shown is also available for purchase. For information, please call 617-562-8814 or visit www.thedise.com.