The ongoing project Every Life is a Fire consists of a series of boxes that unfold to reveal miniature worlds of sculptural assemblages. For example, the current final piece from this body of work, Heir of Nothing (2015—2017), first shown at the Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp, Belgium, opens to reveal a coronet balanced on a series of texts. In contrast to the expansive transparency of Universe, this work and others in the series celebrate interiority while inviting performative engagement. As the art historian John Welchman notes, “Brey’s boxes don’t simply open, instead they unfurl like a flag. The box also houses its own field of reference activated by the very process of opening … as if the box were the site of so many bodily organs and the acts of viewing or entering it a kind of surgical procedure.” (When these pieces were first shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art (M HKA) in Antwerp, Belgium, volunteers unfolded and folded them twice a day for viewers; their ritualized actions imbuing the boxes with the charged sacredness of reliquaries.) Engaging with concepts of internality, Every Life is a Fire poses metaphysical questions about the nature of being, constructing, in Brey’s words, a “hermeneutics of the soul.”
