Talk #118
Brass Art
In conversation with Kwong Lee.
Brass Art is Chara Lewis, Kristin Mojsiewicz and Anneké Pettican, based in Manchester, Glasgow and Huddersfield, UK. Within their collaborative art practice they use analogue and digital technologies as a means to disrupt conventional narratives and to capture themselves in real and imagined situations. Manifest as miniature 3D models, morphic silhouettes, drawings and shadowy digital sprites, their artwork returns to themes of the double, the in/animate, the limen and the atemporal.
Brass Art address the playful aspect of ‘doubling’ and how it is performed within collaborative practice. Using the form of the ‘shadow self’ to represent this process, they animate static forms (figures, silhouettes, objects) with different light-based technologies: from the illusory qualities of the pre-cinematic to white light bodyscanning (3D and 4D) and laser technologies. This manipulation of the body’s anatomical boundaries enables the artists’ portraits to shift between the real and the virtual.
The importance of touch and gesture have been at the forefront of Brass Art’s research thinking and creative practice; most recently they have worked with software designers to create AR artworks to be activated by the user through finger-tip touch.
Recent exhibitions include: xCoAx Convento de São Francisco, Coimbra, Portugal (2022) Brass Art: Touch AR sited billboards and displays, The Turnpike, Leigh; Castlefield Gallery New Art Space, Wigan, Pennington Flash Nature Reserve, Leigh, with Lancashire Wildlife Trust, Imprints: Art Editing Modernism* Shandy Hall, the Laurence Sterne Trust, Coxwold, York, A Modest Show British Art Show 9 collateral event, Manchester. Curated by Nat Pit (2021) Sensorium, SUSAS Shanghai (2019).
