Brass Art: rock, quiver and bend

This summer HOME Manchester will present rock, quiver and bend, an exhibition of new work by Brass Art, (Chara Lewis, Kristin Mojsiewicz and Anneke Pettican), bringing together immersive video, sculpture and lens-based media.

The work featured in rock, quiver and bend explores how light transforms materials through the use of 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, it will transform suspended silver landscapes, and illuminate portraits of the artists disguised in cellophane.

this voice; this life; this procession is a mesmeric video work developed after visiting Woolf’s writing shed at Monk’s House, her last home in Rodmell. Normally closed to the public, Brass Art were permitted access to scan themselves inside this intimate, creative space and its surrounding garden using laser-based technologies, over the course of a single winter’s day. Woolf’s creative writing strategies such as the use of streams of consciousness, atemporality, defamiliarization and her descriptions of fragmented versions of reality, have informed the artists’ approach to creating this film. Focusing on the relationship between space, materials, time and the cinematic, the film is accompanied by an electroacoustic soundscape by composer Annie Mahtani.

The Apparition 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.

The sculptural installation the torrent of things grown so familiar brings together Brass Art’s fascination with geology, erratic boulders and meteors, as markers of deep time and space, along with their interest in the transformation of readily available, inexpensive materials such as foil blanket. In these sculptures, the focus shifts between the exterior silver surface of the foil and the illuminated interior worlds which have been created using digitally scanned botanical models.

For HOME Brass Art have produced a new animated text work which floods the front 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.

Castlefield Gallery at 40

Next year, Castlefield Gallery will celebrate its 40th anniversary and is looking to its past in order to think about the present, and what the future might hold, writes Matthew Pendergast, its Curator and Deputy Director.

More