Debra Broz’s new installation Creature Comfort features reconstructed ceramic figurines and found-object sculpture. Through the past year, Broz has been collecting, compiling and altering discarded furniture, unloved stuffed animals, and unwanted ceramic tchotchkes to create an abnormal world where misfits are held in high regard and ordinary, disregarded things become curiosities with confused and mysterious origins. With humor and tenderness, Broz twists the world of consumer trash and turns it into an uncanny place that speaks to the psychology of object attachment, science fiction, kitsch, and the malleability of identity and truth. 

ARTIST STATEMENT

My sculptures are a product of my continual desire to understand and change the meaning of objects, especially those that were once valued, then discarded. I search for and alter mass-produced secondhand ceramic figurines, stuffed toys and furniture to create sculptures that embrace the unique aspects of the original objects while pushing them into the space of the uncanny. Through my collecting, recycling and reconstruction I reinvent the world, and bring attention, interest and love back to unwanted things. 

I grew up in the rural Midwest with a collection of ceramic animals made from mass-produced molds and hand-painted by my grandmother. I loved these things and as I grew to understand how they were perceived by others it confused me to see them relegated as lowly, laughably ridiculous kitsch, rather than accessible ornaments worthy of recognition. In working with these objects, I draw attention to their subtle uniqueness and give them the respect they deserve. 

In my newest works, I’ve been deconstructing stuffed animals and using them to make costumes for furniture, ceramic animals, and myself. These works, like my ceramic reconstructions, use the mask of comedy to make the tragedy of consumerist waste and lost love palatable. Referencing fairytale and folklore, the overlap of science and science-fiction, and the psychology of comfort objects and consumer culture, my work sentimentally and humorously offers considerations about the power of kitsch, the malleability of identity, and the "truth" of objects as they pass from one owner to another.

ARTIST BIO

Debra Broz collects and deconstructs unwanted ceramic figurines, stuffed animals, and furniture, then combines them into reimagined versions of their former selves. She searches curbside discards, thrift stores and online resale sites for things that were once valued, but have since become unloved. Through a lens of uncanny humor, she considers identity, consumerism, sentimentality, and the process of losing and regaining attention and love.

Broz grew up in rural Missouri. In 2003 she received her BFA in Studio Art from Maryville University - St. Louis. In 2005 she moved to Austin, Texas where she serendipitously found a job working as an apprentice ceramics restorer. This was a breakthrough in her art practice, revealing the techniques that allowed her to begin altering ceramics. She began accumulating animal figurines from thrift stores, showing her first collection of ceramic reconstructions in 2009. Broz was very involved in the Austin art community. She managed an art studio and gallery, co-edited an art magazine and started her own ceramics restoration business.

In 2014, Broz moved to Los Angeles where she continues her art practice and her work in ceramics restoration. Broz exhibits with Track 16 Gallery in Los Angeles, Paradigm Gallery in Philadelphia and has had exhibits at the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Austin Museum of Art, and Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. Her work has been featured in print in Ceramics Monthly, American Craft, and Frankie magazines; and in two international surveys of contemporary ceramics. She is also involved with two artist-run spaces, Monte Vista Projects and Gallery Also.