By: Kathryn Hixson – catalog essay, 1994

Rummaging through thrift stores, peering into antique-shop windows, scouring tables at county re-sale fairs, we, though members of the modern consumer society, are still inexorably drawn to the thrills of the past

Old dusty objects – some of uncertain yet once-crucial functions like wooden egg incubators or ice-boxes, some of whispery fragility like gracefully penned post-cards of quaint places sent to relatives far away – embody a nostalgia for the good old days, the luxurious times past, indulging in romantic musing which have passed from a stern physical remembrance to a seemingly genetically encoded reverie. Jef Bourgeau feels and understands this attraction to the remnants of past lives, finding odd antiquated things to incorporate into his art installations. The chipped patinas and worn surfaces of bureaus, bird-cages, hat-forms and suitcases provide him with ready-made icons of sentimental, domestic, intimate experience: what was precious to the original, and subsequent, owners is passed on to the contemporary buyer. The strength and depth of personal history is graciously handed down.

Tapping another historical realm, Bourgeau also acknowledges the sentimental attraction of art historical things. Matisse florals, Monet haystacks, Munch screams, Duchamp’s gestures, and Picasso’s visage have become so familiar as to become collectible icons, appearing in print or on posters. This packaged culture is passed on, courteously received into the most humble parlors.

Perhaps these inheritances are not so purely received by the inheritors. What burden, denials or forced fictions do they dictate and deem to continue? And what do these tell us about what we wish to remember, and that we wish to forget? Is their assumed purity irreconcilably tainted by traffic in the media/electronic chaos of the present? What, in these objects and icons, empowers us to participate in our world, and what, in their exclusionary existence, do they deny us to explore?

Bourgeau invites the viewer to wander with such questions in his installations which incorporate still burgeoning traditions: those of film and video. Similar to his collecting of now rather anonymous functional objects and art "logos," the artists also culls sequences from obscure films or uses his own footage. Banking on the familiarity of the "feel of old films to entice viewers to watch, Bourgeau processes his and others’ imagery into repeated snippets of highly charged but truncated narrative image sequence. These he deftly interjects, accompanied by similarly acquired audio tracks, into layers of nostalgic stuff. The moving images are consistently shown on very ting video monitors buried within the sculptural arrangements, so that the videos become completely integrated with the work, both formally and emotionally.

All of this nostalgia can quickly become a burden, and the present seems to merely repeat the past. Upon close scrutiny, the romanticized good old days are only tediously repetitive daily live of toils, fears and deaths too similar to our own. Bourgeau elicits feelings of tedium by sometimes literally repeating short video sequences endlessly, and by starting narrative that never reach a climax and only begin again. He renders palpable the treadmills of our lives, seemingly doomed to play by the rules passed down from that romanticized past, continually repeating the game.

The method here is neither didactic nor empathetic emotional collaboration. In his sculpture accumulations, Bourgeau juxtaposes compelling objects in simple but jarring ways. Hatrack is the lower half of a child’s mannequin, its underwear fathered around its knees about tidy shoes and socks, exposing a generic, or rather denied, sexual identity. The body is topped off with a man’s wood hat-form. This potent, yet totally ambiguous montage: Disparate images are collaged in sequence to create a resonating unfixable meaning.

The use of little video images hidden without domesticated sculptures also plays to the fear of surveillance, a.k.a. snooping. Bourgeau has related to the comment that we no longer need to fear Big Brother, but rather should be paranoid of Little Brother sneaking around info=nets, burrowing into our private affairs with cheap video cameras, and downlinking incriminating images to MTV.

Pleasure and bonding, as well as suffering and alienation, begin at home. Bourgeau here mines this familiar territory by arranging his sculptural installations to fit the domestic model: The kitchen is often the warm gathering place, the kid’s room a place of escape and fear, the garden a buffer against the rest of the world. The viewer is enticed metaphorically to come have a cup of coffee. After intimacy is established, however, one begins to feel the awkwardness that Bourgeau so efficiently integrates into his work, heartily entering into interpretive conversation with it while squirming to understand the slowly apparent mystery of its mundane existence.

Like early science fiction novels, Bourgeau accentuates to the hilt aspects of our normal existence to create an atmosphere of the coming fin de siecle, where grueling high-tech futurism meshes with a nostalgic yearning for "simple" times. By resoundingly exaggerating the mundanities and endless repetitions of our lives, he tampers with the given, tedious, necessary toil of the world, colluding with the tarrying viewer to create a plethora of meanings. In effect, by sticking to the rules so adroitly, Bourgeau blasphemously mocks those rules, out-mundaning the mundane, turning everything upside down -- pulling it out of focus – to revel the liberating complexity of the real.