Lewis, C., Pettican, A., Mojsiewicz, K., 2024.

Brass Art:Rock,Quiver and Bend

Exhibition information:

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.

Links:
Brass Art: rock, quiver and bend
https://homemcr.org/exhibition/brass-art-rock-quiver-and-bend/

Reviews
Brass Art. A Room of Virginia Woolf's Own - Susannah Thompson - ArtReview - September 2024 print edition - and Art Review online - published 28 August 2024
https://artreview.com/brass-art-rock-quiver-and-bend-home-manchester-review-susannah-thompson/
Brass Art: Heart of the Matter - John Beagles - Sight and Sound -SSSep24 - publisher BFI - print August 2024
https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/news/sight-sound-september-2024-issue
The Artists in The Exhibition: A Depiction - Brass Art at HOME
- Jo Manby - The Fourdrinier - Experimental - Aug 2024
https://www.thefourdrinier.com/experimental-aug-2024-the-artists-in-the-exhibition-a-depiction-brass-art-at-home
Brass Art: Rock, quiver and bend review - Jazmine Linklater - Corridor8 - 13th June
https://corridor8.co.uk/article/brass-art-rock-quiver-and-bend
Brass Art: Rock, quiver and bend review - Desmond Bullen - Northern Soul - 11th June
https://www.northernsoul.me.uk/br/