CRISTINE BRACHE
Read at KGB on 8 Dec 2021

Cristine’s website is styled like a newspaper. The stories are “Time Is Disgusting” and “Shelly Finally Says No: Stop Being So Careful About What To Say and Why.” The weather report reads, “God Could’ve Given Me A Blue Sky.” An article indicates that Cristine is missing, last seen wearing a black t-shirt with the words “Not My Problem” on it, foul play potentially involved. It’s written in first person: “I am missing. I don’t know where I am. Have you seen me?” 

Cristine’s website, like all of her work, shows a level of care; attention to detail; relaxed, melodic humor; and taste of the uncanny that makes me feel safe and excited to be alive. Her body of work, which includes video art, digital art, sculpture, art objects, poetry, and, recently, a new podcast, “Cross My Heart,” seems to me to exist at the bright point where lightness and dark, sweetness and strangeness, gentleness and the brutality of life meet. 

In the first episode of her new podcast, in which guests are invited to discuss taboo subjects with openness and curiosity, her oldest friend tells a story of sleeping with his high school teacher. He describes the experience as a mixed bag — it was scary, it was hot, he wasn’t ready, he didn’t begin to unpack the traumatic elements until 10 years later. Something that struck me, in listening, was that in all the sections of the story where a typical podcast host might interject, make some salacious comment or knowing sound, Cristine simply listened. It reminded me of a story [her husband] Brad [Phillips] told on another podcast about sobbing like an infant after a particularly crazy experience on psychedelics, and how Cristine sat with him and let him cry. This sense of patience, intuition, & nonjudgment is consistent across Cristine’s artistic and poetic work.

Her first book of poetry, Poems, out on the very-good but now-defunct press Codette, contains work written between 2008 and 2018, including ambiguous meditations on identity, power dynamics, and templates of the female body and psyche. In an interview with Monica Uszerowicz of the LA Review of Books after Poems came out, Cristine speaks to the difference between her poetry and visual art practices in a section I want to quote in full. Cristine says, “All writing, I think, especially if you’re writing about your experience and sharing that with people, is the most vulnerable thing. Art and performance can be, too, but my artwork — though I might say it’s diaristic — is very mediated. Reading poems — they’re not mediated at all. I write to feelings I had during a moment that was meaningful to me; to get to the meat of that pain or love or whatever emotion it is, you do it alone.” I’m very pleased to welcome to the mic tonight, Cristine Brache.