Home have announced the solo exhibition of new work by Brass Art (Chara Lewis, Kristin Mojsiewicz & Anneke Pettican), rock, quiver and bend.
Launching on Sat 1 Jun, the exhibition brings together sculpture, lens-based media and immersive video.
The brand-new work explores materials transformed by light using analogue, digital and laser-based forms of capture. In this exhibition, light will digitally rake through the house, garden and writing room of Virginia Woolf, transform suspended silver landscapes, and illuminate cellophane-disguised silhouette portraits of the artists.
A central motif in Brass Art’s practice is the crossing of thresholds – passing through seemingly impermeable boundaries that punctuate physical and digital space. Their use of foil blankets and mirrors creates a slippage between interior and exterior space, as well as a way to bounce light to create perforations, and trick laser scanners to create ‘shadow’ holes or occlusions.
The works in this exhibition stem from the artists’ research at the National Trust property of Monks’ House in Rodmell, the last home of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and in the archives of Manchester Museum (Botanical and Geological collections) and The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum (pre-cinematic spectacle).
Key works in the exhibition include an immersive video work, this voice; this life; this procession, developed after visiting Woolf’s writing shed at Rodmell. Public access to Woolf’s writing shed is limited to a viewing window, but Brass Art were permitted access to scan themselves inside this intimate, creative space and its surrounding garden using non-invasive, laser-based technologies, over the course of a single winter’s day.
In this work, Woolf’s own creative approach and writing strategies – streams of consciousness, atemporality, defamiliarization – are brought to bear in the transmission of fluid and speculative ideas.
Being able to ‘move through’ the resulting digital data layers visualises aspects of the multiple, fragmented versions of reality and time that Woolf herself articulated. this voice; this life; this procession focuses on the relationship between the spatial, material, temporal, and cinematic, accompanied by an electroacoustic soundscape by Birmingham based composer Annie Mahtani.
The Apparition photo series is developed from research into pre-cinematic spectacle, using coloured cellophane as a way of “seeing the mundane world” anew and references the Modernist yet distinctly proto-feminist set designs of Florine Stettheimer. The artists disguise themselves with cellophane to create grotesque portrait silhouettes based on pre-cinematic shadow devices.
Sculptural installation the torrent of things grown so familiar brings together Brass Art’s geological fascination with erratic boulders and meteors, as markers of deep time and space, with their interest in the transformation of readily available, inexpensive materials. In the sculptural forms, the focus shifts between the exterior silver surface of the foil blanket and an illuminated interior world of digitally scanned botanical models.
Finally, Brass Art have produced a new animated text work which floods the entrance of the gallery space with a pulse of colour. This work meditates on life, death and the creative impetus, echoing the phrase this voice this life this procession in the vital medium of neon.
Clarissa Corfe, HOME’s Creative Producer: Visual Art, says,
“We are thrilled to be working with Brass Art on their major solo exhibition, rock, quiver and bend. I’ve been following their practice for many years, and this new body of extraordinary work for HOME marks 25 years of their collaborative practice. Their work creates a dialogue with the practices of some of the most important 20th century women artists, combining literary and aesthetic devices with Brass Art’s own radical and unique approach to perception and narrative. Using a wide range of digital and analogue technology, audiences can expect to find work that is mesmerizing and resonant, expanding our understanding of time, space and our place within it.”
