C.T. and Kirkland Bray: “Billykirk”
- Eye Level
- Apr 12
- 5 min read
The brothers celebrate a quarter-century of art, commerce, and hustle with a retrospective of sculptures, paintings, and consumer products from their laboratory.
The most intriguing new boutique in town is only open until Easter. Even by the erratic standards of Jersey City commerce, it keeps weird hours: 1 to 4 on weekends. This is coterminous with the public viewing schedule at Art House Productions (345 Marin Blvd.), and there’s a very good reason for that. There’s weird, eye-catching art all over the place. Oh, and one other thing — very little of the merchandise in the display racks is actually for sale. What sort of a store is this, anyway?
The easy answer is that it isn’t a store at all, but instead the latest show at the Art House Productions gallery. Technically, that’d be true, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. Many artists in Jersey City have shaken hands with commerce and kept their peculiar spirits intact. But few have turned the trick quite as gracefully as brothers Kirkland and Chris “C.T.” Bray of designers and artisans Billykirk, or held the grip as long or as emphatically as they have.
“Billykirk: 25 Years of Art & Design” puts a quarter century of work together as bag-makers, belt-whippers, leather-tamers, shoe designers and rogue entrepreneurs in dialogue with the strange and curious works of art that the siblings have made during their many years in town. That means portage for couriers alongside oxidized corkscrew sculptures, and old feature articles from fashion magazines (one by Malcolm Gladwell) right beneath paintings of eerie landscapes and held-breath moments at crowded but curiously inert theater floors. Not all of the items are on sale racks: some are mounted to the wall, and some are tucked on the floor, just like they do it at the Madewell shops.
To a certain kind of Jersey City gallerygoer, this union of biz and imagination will cause no dissonance whatsoever. Artists like to sell the things they make, after all, and hustle is still the best way to survive the protracted exposure to the marketplace that creative life often demands. Yet “Billykirk” includes words rarely seen in a local gallery, including Levis, Cole Haan, Gucci, Vans, and Target. The Brays haven’t just made reluctant peace with the mainstream, as some artists must. They’ve pursued and realized creative partnerships with international retailers.
This quest — not for societal acceptance, but for business opportunities — is at the heart of “Billykirk,” a retrospective of a plucky little company and its two offbeat founders. The show reminds us that making oddball art is no impediment to adoption by a corporate sponsor. It may actually be a prerequisite.
Oddballs the Brays certainly are. They work in different mediums, but they share an aesthetic sensibility. They both seem to exist in a waiting world, and there’s a definite sense that what they’re waiting for will never come. There’s nothing particularly apocalyptic about their settings, but there is a creeping sense that the world has ended when nobody was looking, and the subjects of these works haven’t realized it yet. Maybe they never will.
For C.T. Bray, the hopeful but spectral characters he’s bringing to life are fashioned out of old blocks of wood and fragments of metal machinery that, through a wizardly process that feels an awful lot like love for the abject and useless, he’s imbued with a powerful sense of personality. Kirkland Bray, an oil painter, situates his subjects on long, empty roads to nowhere, in still water, and in concert halls with every seat occupied and every face turned toward a curtain that isn’t going to lift. Though this work isn’t exactly satirical — it’s too emotional for that, even if the emotions are understated — the brothers are both poking fun at the concept of utility. These objects serve no purpose, and these people have no trajectory. The Brays challenge you to value them anyway.
In Kirkland Bray’s “Hitchhiker Gathering,” scores of people with thumbs out crowd the narrow shoulders of a desert highway. The muted light on bare grey mountains and the length of the shadows tells us that it’s late in the day. The ground is stony, the vegetation is scrubby, and the asphalt is unmolested by automobile traffic. Even if a car came and the driver opened its doors, it wouldn’t make a dent in the hitchers’ demands. Yet even as the sun scorches the landscape, there’s no sign of restiveness. Bray’s lot leans over the road in anticipation, and may well lean that way forever.
Just as compliant are the people in “No Show,” one of the artist’s studies of self-imposed isolation in the midst of a crowd. Here, hundreds of heads are oriented toward a massive, golden-lit proscenium stage and its heavy curtain. Just as in “Hitchhiker Gathering,” close quarters don’t prompt interaction. These people aren’t paying attention to each other. They’re concentrating on their private hopes for a shift in their condition, and in so doing, they’re shutting themselves off from neighbors who are right on top of them. Meanwhile, his mute curtains look like the baggy knickers of a giant that has turned its back on the audience.
C.T. Bray’s sculpture is lonesome, too. He’s fitted a curved, hat-like piece of wood to a weathered metal panel, adorned it with a buttons and a rosette, and fashioned out of these pieces a little bust of Napoleon. Its staring, shellshocked eyes and flimsy legs mark this as a likeness of the great man after Waterloo, standing alone without an army to flank him. “Ghost of the Lenape” is a long, distraught, wrinkled face with deep-set eyes carved into a piece of wood as gnarled as a shaman’s staff He’s topped it with a ball (C.T. loves balls; check “Bonny Boule Rouge,” a play of stone, clay. rubber, and shadow that’s as enchanting as an ice cream scoop) and mounted it on a metal pedestal that doesn’t look like it could support the piece, but somehow does. Ghosts, it seems, are weightless, carrying nothing with them but accusations.
In “Harvey Ball No. 2.” he tucks a battered smiley face sphere in a sheathe of wood. It’s a protective gesture, a peek-a-boo, a receptacle for a precious good mood. Most successful of all in its unity of the organic and inorganic is “Deux Flotteurs,” a sculpture that tucks two aluminum canisters into a groove cut into an old block of wood. The harmony it achieves between metal and wood is a poignant one. In this setting, both seem oddly archaic: residue of an industrial past deemed needless in a plastic present.
It’s this attention to the poetry of materials that links the Bray artworks to the Bray commercial products, and maybe even blurs the line between them. Billykirk primarily works in leather, and leather is famously pliable and tactile. The No. 211 Frame Bike Pouch, smooth and terra cotta-colored, feels as molded as a work in potter’s clay. A shelf of tiny pouches fastened with buttons stares out, shoulder to rectangular shoulder, like droids awaiting activation. They’ve got the patience of Kirkland’s characters and the sense of history of C.T.’s assemblies.
Shrewdly, the brothers combine many of the Billykirk products with older items that inspired them, and they’ve raided the archives for images of the brothers, young and hopeful, launching the company, making plans, and sketching studio space for their not-overly-mad science. Is this all a bit self-congratulatory? Maybe. But if you’re going to succeed in business, you’d better cultivate some self-confidence. Every swimmer knows: it’s a heck of a lot easier to go far out when you know there’s a world waiting for you when you come back in.
(Kirkland and C.T. Bray will do a gallery talk at Art House Productions on Sunday, April 13 at 2 p.m. The show is viewable during regular Art House Gallery hours: 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on the weekends. It’s up until April 20.)
