Before Seattle-based jeweler, sculptor, and conceptual artist Jana Brevick set out to produce her series of Cat 5-compliant wedding rings, she did some research to see if anyone else was already making them. “The joke was so funny and obvious that I thought it’d already been done,” she says.
It hadn’t been done, so she raided the back stock bins at hardware stores to collect oversized male/ female sets. She wanted the parts to be big enough to get the joke across and to highlight the sculptural aspects of the connectors.
Everchanging Ring, one of the artist’s more popular projects, best exemplifies how Brevick strives for unity of form, function, and meaning. The 24-karat gold wedding band can be returned on an annual basis to be reshaped. More often than not, the owners wind up loving it as is and don’t want it changed at all.
Brevick’s ongoing exploration of outdated technology encompasses both wearable sculptural objects and large-scale art installations. Tinker Tailor Jeweler Spy, her 2006 exhibition at Soil Art Gallery, investigated the culture of post-9/11 surveillance.
“I didn’t feel like I had any secrets anymore,” Brevick says about the show’s impetus. A 12"-high skyscraper was outfitted with a jumble of miniature sterling silver antennas while Personal Top-Secret Password Printer came with a tiny silver satellite dish. Along similar lines is the recent Moving Target series — necklace pendants in the shape of a bull’s-eye. Brevick says she’s interested in the “beautiful, classic design” and its implications about the hunter and hunted.
Brevick is currently researching how to incorporate Nixie tubes — glass tubes used to display neon numerals — into jewelry. “They’re so enchanting because they glow and the scale lends itself to being worn,” she said. However, she’s run into a minor obstacle in terms of how to power them. “You can’t wear that much battery pack on your back,” she says. Doubtless, Brevick will devise an elegant solution, one that reckons with technology on its own terms.
—Katie Kurtz
>> Brevick’s Jewelry: flickr.com/photos/janabrevick
Photograph by Roger Schreiber
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