Give and Take

Artist Wayne Brezinka conjures the Bible's most long-suffering soul in response to 2020 in Nashville

Wayne Brezinka (on left) shows his installation, “2020 Disrupted” at CreatiVets studio. From the side, the sculptural elements of the piece stand out. PHOTO: DAVID BRAUD

By Joe Nolan

Job had it going on. Until he didn’t.

Just like in the Book of Job, many of our neighbors lost their livelihoods, their assets, their homes and their loved ones to the varied catastrophes Nashville endured in 2020. A new installation by local artist Wayne Brezinka re-imagines Job and his trials through a contemporary, local lens. This ambitious and vivid multimedia display combines sculpture, painting and even digital video monitors to cast the recent suffering of our city in the story of the Bible’s most long-suffering soul.

At first the comparison seems simplistic, but as the piece reacquaints viewers with the Job story, the analogy is surprisingly, unfortunately, painfully accurate. For better and worse, we Nashvillians have become pros at disaster: We regrouped and rebuilt after the tornado outbreak that scrambled our city back in 1998, and then we did it all again when we were hit by the flood of 2010. But in just the last 13 months we’ve been hit by another tornado, blasted by a bomber and washed out by another flood during a period of social unrest in the middle of a global pandemic. The most important thing about Brezinka’s installation isn’t that it reminds us of our capacity to endure, but that it reminds us of just how hard it’s all been. And just how plain numb many of us have actually become.

“In this new work, I am exploring the pain and anxiety of massive disruption and how we are changed by it. This is my attempt to bring a re-imagined 21st century Job to life in a way that encapsulates not only his experience, but also our own,” writes Brezinka in a post on his website (waynebrezinka.com/ disrupted-process-gallery) where he details the process behind the installation.

The Job of the Old Testament is stoic in the face of his tragic losses — he’s cleareyed and resolute. Brezinka’s Job is stunned: his head is lifted; his wide unblinking eyes search for God in the sky; his mouth hangs wide open. Brezinka used his father-in-law as a model for Job, painting his protagonist from the dramatically lit photographs the pair staged together. The dramatic pose and Brezinka’s use of light in his portrait nods to the Biblical paintings of Caravaggio, and it’s a fun stylistic nod to bring to a cardboard painting with an eye-popping contemporary palette.

The artist’s late father-in-law was a Navy veteran who operated a youth homeless shelter in Colorado Springs, CO. 2020 Disrupted: A Re-Assembled Life is being displayed at CreatiVets studio in the 12th South neighborhood where one of Brezinka’s father-in-law’s paintings is on display.

The Contributor’s readers might know that homelessness disproportionately affects military veterans: According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, on a single night in January, 2020, almost 40,000 American veterans had no place to call home in the country they fought for, and may have been injured – or even disabled – defending. The hardships faced by veterans are Job-like in their compounding relentlessness. Like any Nashvillians our military veteran neighbors spent 2020 navigating the hardships of our city’s lack of affordable housing on top of the myriad challenges of the past year. Add to these the burden of impacts that come from multiple deployments — including traumatic brain injury and PTSD — and Brezinka’s Biblical allusions must be uncomfortably familiar to the unsung former warriors struggling to survive on Nashville’s streets. CreatiVets empowers military veterans to heal through art therapy. By participating in guitar and songwriting classes, and painting, drawing and sculpting lessons, CreatiVets’ artists can overcome their own Job-like struggles while connecting through the shared-experiences of supportive peers. 2020 Disrupted is covered in Brezinka’s colorful, almost a little cartoon-like painting, but the project is thoroughly sculptural. Job’s constructed out of several pieces of cardboard which are fitted-together against another separate background layer. Job is “sitting’’ on an actual garbage can and it serves as a kind of ironic throne for Job as a king sitting on top of a mountain of trash: tires, clocks, wooden posts, empty plastic bottles and disposed-of egg containers.

Brezinka’s also embedded video monitors into the garbage, which piles-up at the bottom of the installation. The screens scroll through slideshow images which Brezinka solicited from our Nashville neighbors. Nashvillians also donated all the objects piled up in the wreckage that’s left from

Job’s worldly losses. Some of the video images picture healthcare workers and some are portraits of patients. There are smiling selfies at protest marches, and scans of old faded photos of family members who were lost in this last sad, strange year. All this discarded stuff might have been strewn across East Nashville after the tornado last march, or it could’ve been choking a creek in South Nashville just a few weeks ago after the spring floods that destroyed homes and businesses and took even more of the lives of our neighbors after a full year of quarantining against a global pandemic.

The pile of broken, blown-apart stuff might have been swept up off of 2nd avenue after the Christmas morning bombing that shook our already-limited holiday celebrations with paranoia and confusion. Of course, the original story of Job — and Brezinka’s painterly re-telling — both serve as allegories for perseverance in the face of overwhelming hardship. And all of Brezinka’s broken, bashed-apart bits also represent less material things like lost jobs, lost opportunities, lost sense of purpose and dreams deferred.

Brezinka’s installation has an almost theatrical feel with its backdrop-style background and its “base” spilling away from a wall at the CreatiVets studio, creating a sense of a fourth wall between viewers and his weary protagonist. Of course, a theatrical production of Job might follow the structure of a Greek tragedy — if not a Darren Aronofsky film — and Brezinka has populated this painterly “play” with a pair of birds that each serve as separate choruses, echoing the competing themes of Job’s story. One of the coolest constructions in Brezinka’s built-out scene is a large vulture which sits on a bare branch above Job’s head. Job’s desperate eyes are watching for God, but his vision is blocked by this bloated and raggedy scavenger.

The artist fashioned Job’s bald, unblinking antagonist out of layers of painted cardboard, textiles and actual feathers, achieving a look so greasy and weather-beaten you can practically smell the roadkill it had for breakfast. But, fluttering its wings below the buzzard, just a little too low to catch Job’s shock-brimming eyes, is a beautiful bluebird. Brezinka fashioned this flitting flier out of cardboard, paint and feathers just like the turkey vulture. But, this bird’s signature blue back and orange-gold belly stand-out from the grim palette of the rest of installation, and its wings are thrown-back wide at a dramatic angle. The black vulture is indifferent, staring into the distance as if Job’s ultimate failure is a foregone conclusion — who could possibly endure all of this? But the little bluebird keeps flapping furiously singing a defiant song of hope and insisting with unlikely optimism that all is not lost.