public, presenting myself as some kind of visionary. Let me tell you about feminism, I said, about women, I said, and all along Jake was watching me from the back of the room, his arms crossed.
Imagine if they really knew who I am, what I’ve put up with. Miranda Brand, a feminist! Took a man’s name, took his punches, let him hold her down. Then she turned around and told us she had it all figured out.
My photos are lies.
I never meant them that way. I cut deep into myself, I took myself apart, the way you have to, to produce anything. I thought what I pulled out was the truth. It felt like the truth: intestines, dark and swollen, coming out of the slit space, widening me. Maybe I was tricked by the pain.
SERIES 4, Clippings & publications
BOX 18, News clippings
FOLDER: Jake Brand
* * *
Contemporary Art
SEPTEMBER 1992
THE OTHER BRAND
Jake Brand, 43, is best known to the art world as husband to photographer Miranda Brand, who took his name when they married in 1981. But Jake himself is a talented painter. We talked to Jake about his upcoming San Francisco show, The Low Down (opening at the Chaminska Space on September 20); his artistic process; and, of course, his wife.
Contemporary Art: How does it feel to have your first solo show?
Jake Brand: I’m enormously excited. The Low Down shows the whole range of my career, from my “plastics” series to the landscapes I’ve been working on more recently. It’s humbling to look back and see how you’ve evolved over the years.
CA: The show also includes a series you call the Nangussett paintings. I presume that’s after the institution where your wife, Miranda Brand, was hospitalized for postpartum psychosis in 1982.
JB: Yes. Those paintings are based on what I saw inside the hospital when I visited Miranda. The places Miranda slept or ate, the people she met. It took me some years to feel able to tackle that subject. What Miranda and I went through during those years … the memories are still very raw. It was a traumatic time for me. She was so inaccessible. As a husband, I felt very helpless. Producing these paintings was therapeutic for me.
CA: I was struck by how explicit the paintings are, given that Miranda has been so private about the experience. She sued the tabloid that ran the initial story for quite a bit of money, didn’t she? But she was fine with you putting these paintings out there?
JB: Look, there’s a big difference between a tabloid running a story and your husband working through his memories in an artistic medium. Miranda understands I need to process my feelings about that time. She would never interfere with my self-expression.
CA: Miranda obviously looms large in contemporary art. Does that create pressure in your relationship?
JB: You know, it actually doesn’t, because we are trying to accomplish such different things. We work in different media, different subject matter. We do happen to have the same dealer, which is just the luck of the draw, that he saw something in both our work. But that doesn’t create tension so much as it helps us stay in the loop about each other. We really understand what the other is going through. In that way, being married to another artist is an incredible gift. The art world is so dog-eat-dog. You can be here one minute and gone another. It’s a relief to know you have someone you can trust. Someone who’s watching everything you do.
SERIES 2, Personal papers
BOX 9, Diary (1982–1993)
SEPTEMBER 26 1992
New theory: no image is complete without a clue to its continuity. A line that moves beyond the edge. The shadow of an unseen object. A pattern extending outward.
Something suffering beyond the edges of the frame.
22.
KATE
The dining room was looking pretty good. Kate stretched her arms overhead as she surveyed the scene. She had gotten through the first and second passes of all the boxes and sorted the documents into twenty-two main categories. Now she was doing a third pass on some of the problem areas—like the mail crates full of fan letters, most of them unopened. Slitting apart these envelopes felt violent somehow, even with the sleek silver letter opener she had found in a kitchen drawer. All morning she had been tearing into one Dear Miranda, I know you might never read this but after another, and the sound of paper ripping felt so anathema to the care she had taken with all the