Project Room I:
Bruce Busby: Super Faulty Reconfiguration

Bruce Busby investigates the idea that there are impurities and “inhibitants” in our atmosphere that cause creative blockage, frustration, inefficiency, and confusion. His work seeks to create environments in which we can escape these negative forces, and regain our peace of mind and the ability to think clearly. Busby’s Creativity Enhancement Shelters are safe-havens for just this enterprise. Designed, cut, and sewn by the artist out of nylon and in many color combinations, the shelters take on a wide variety of shapes and sizes and appear as idiosyncratic tents. From bifurcated and curvilinear structures to objects that appear to be cutting-edge teepees, Busby’s shelters include transparent sections, mesh windows, and even, in some cases, a central oculus that imparts a chapel-like environment, perfect for reflection and contemplation. The structures shield their users both physically and conceptually from the vices of the urban landscape. Though sturdy, tensile, and self-supporting, all of Busby’s shelters are also completely collapsible and transportable, so that one’s filtration system can be taken along and erected anywhere. In addition to these structures, Busby creates large scale drawings of Creativity Impairment Plumes, abstract diagrams that illustrate the diaphanous but threatening forces that make his shelters so necessary.

For this, his first museum exhibition, Busby will create an installation including a new large-scale shelter that is modular and can be attached to any number of other like structures through a system of quick-release buckles and zippers. While his shelters are structured around concepts of mobility and flexibility, Busby’s new drawings have a geographic specificity. On view in Project Room 1 will also be a series of Busby’s Creativity Amplification Quakes (CRAQUE) drawings, depicting intricate, billowing clouds of contamination rising from the actual fault lines of the San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles areas. These lush, detailed renderings have a rich, almost Baroque handling, belying a sinister, fluid, and pervading energy that rises from and swirls around the land. Busby began the series as a way to diagram and become intimately reacquainted with the simultaneously beautiful and dangerous California topography. By articulating the literal cracks within these particular landscapes. Busby links the work both to his Bay Area home and to the Santa Monica Museum of Art.