Eric Braun’s automatons amuse and disconcert. He recycles made-in-China material, plastic dolls from which he tears off heads, arms, and legs to replace them with the skulls of birds or small mammals or lobster claws. He removes their clothes to glue bits of fake fur on the plastic. Transformed, these exquisite carcasses wriggle and sing in English with Asian voices. These unlikely beings belong to no defined species and outwit our resistance and childhood fears. Eric Braun has also created work as a painter that has ties to surrealists such as Salvador Dali. He too draws with a dreamlike, precise eroticism.
Finally, we must also salute his tremendous work as founder and curator of Usine 106U gallery where he exhibits the work of marginal Montreal artists and the magazine featuring the gallery’s name.
Patrick Cady
