Charlie Brouwer - Rise Up Winston-Salem, 2009 - ncculture.com SECCA

Working with traditional farming materials like locust and hemlock wood, Charlie Brouwer has been placing sculptures in public settings since 1989. His nine-acre property in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Willis, Virginia has become an idyllic home to approximately twenty of these works, surrounding the 100-year old farmhouse where he and his wife presently live. The subject matter of these sculptures ranges from human figures and house-like enclosures to leaves, train cars, and that which continues to inspire him: the ladder. As material, muse and metaphor, the ladder has returned regularly to this artist's work -- accumulating meaning with every application. For Brouwer it spans a spectrum of symbolism from Jacob's Ladder and the Tower of Babel to Albrecht Durer's 1514 engraving Melancholia and Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven. In his words, "...we build and repair with ladders, we pick fruit from ladders, we rescue with ladders. With ladders we reach over, rise up, and transcend."

Taking this notion of "rising up" as inspiration for a project that could translate the human impulse to strive for something higher into a form of community building, Brouwer began the Rise Up series in 2002. From Michigan to Virginia to North Carolina, it has subsequently travelled the USA -- borrowing ladders from local citizens and businesses to create "portraits" of their respective communities. In these temporary monuments Brouwer highlights the human qualities of ladders by tying them together into fragile formations -- leaning upon one another to build something greater than the individual. For Rise Up Winston-Salem, a house-like structure bridges the inherent danger of using ladders with the security associated with the home. In so doing, Brouwer forges an image of simultaneous caution and ambition - congregating objects, stories and dreams into a sanctuary of what could be when people rise together.
www.charliebrouwer.com

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