Brandon Perhacs’ 13th birthday could have been branded by braces or soccer or other mainstream stuff.
But, the son of a bronze sculptor and a toy designer, he was destined for design. He considered fighting it, like any thoughtful teenage rebel, recanting the vision that betrayed him as his parents’. Only a book of theirs did him in. In “Space of Akari and Stone” he discovered Isamu Noguchi. While other kids worshiped Michael Jordan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, he was mesmerized by the first person to place electric bulbs in paper lamps.
Now, he’s fabricating innovative lamps of his own for his modern gallery, The End., which opened May 6, down a Winslow pocket alley.
Past Plum, past color card garlands, potted plants and impeccable handwriting, you’ll find wide windows and you’ll peer in.
At first glance, you might notice the color scheme: black, red, white, like a Yemeni flag. Then a twiggy chandelier will arrest you and you’ll have to walk in, provided it’s any day but Monday and after 1 p.m.
“Abstraction” is a pendant light that comes in two models, “gothic” and “branch.” Medusa would gladly wear the latter, what with its twiggy tentacles. The former looks like the wings of a bat. Both take inspiration from nature. Perhacs copied the pieces, which are interchangeable, from a dead Manzanita near Joshua Tree.
“The branches were sun-bleached and white, and it was beginning to be sunset, so light was shining through it and casting shadows along the desert floor,” he said. “It was a beautiful moment. I wanted to take some of that and bring it back.”
Besides his own work, Perhacs stocks concrete clocks from a Taiwanese studio. They’re anatomized into cascading steps, like a spiral staircase at bird’s eye view.
The End.’s singular table, an unvarnished chunky “z” in the center of the room, holds matching watches as well as writing tools: a mechanical pencil with convex tree rings, a rollerball pen without vertigo, a contour sketch pencil.
His mother’s vessels look ancient; delicate, wide bowls made from hand-pulped beeswax paper. Their earthiness feigns a functional past, though they’re merely sculptural, “not meant to put soup in,” Perhacs added.
His humor comes out with PyroPets, a series of faceted animal candles that burn down to the bones, exposing creepy and/or cool metal skeletons. There’s Dýri, the white reindeer, and Kisa, a could be Chartreux cat. Perhacs has the sense to keep his real, live kitty out of the office. He’s much too enamored with her to let her watch her wax kin burn to death.
The other stuff is Perhacs’ own, conceived in the shower or, more often, in the throes of design. Either way, the goal is to make physical poetry.
“I try to distill something down to a simple form,” he says.
“Brake Lights” are Perhacs’ newest fixture. They remind him of teepees. They’re tribal-bright tents with steel or aluminum flaps, named for the metal-bending tool that makes them. He enjoys wordplay that lends to dual meanings. “The End.” is also the beginning; Brake, like take a break.
“It makes you kind of tilt your head,” he said.
Perhacs was all of 5 when Bob Dylan popularized the waving-lighters-at-concerts concept, but his “Migration” could easily be a Zippo stand-in.
He swears, however, that the “strange oil candle” came to him in a daze: “I pictured this migration of animals and humans going across a plain in the night,” he said.
The torch is set within a glass tube, which rests at an angle within a composite base.
“And that leaning was the direction they were going in,” he explains.
“Adaptation,” a quartet of test tube-like vases, offers flower arranging for geometrists. Saddled with steel spheres on a magnet-laden wood plank, the tubes can be tilted to your heart’s content. Imagine obtuse, acute and right angles in one glorious display. (And sacrifice less from your garden; we’re talking buds, people.)
The second room is the inner sanctum, mostly because people don’t realize it’s real. “They think it’s like a picture,” Perhacs said, which is intentional.
The black tyvex walls pop like yin; the contents conjure outer space. Are those rust sculptures or rocket rubble? Granite landscapes or moon pix?
There isn’t a whole lot of modern art on Bainbridge, Perhacs says.
But the beginning is The End.
Explore The End.
Visit the gallery at 130 Winslow Way East from 1 to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday and also by appointment. Call 206-842-2625 or go to www.facebook.com/theend.bainbridge or www.perhacs-studio.com for info.
