Unit X: Brass Art

The week before we broke up for Easter, me and my friend Sonia gate-crashed an art lecture. I say gate-crashed because after about 5 minutes we realised that we were the only fashion students in the entire lecture theatre and the content wasn't really directed at us at all. Nevertheless, it’s probably the most bad-ass thing I shall ever do!

But this being a collaborative unit and possibly the only chance we will have to deviate from everything fashion, this incident turned out to be a bit of a ‘happy accident’. For you see, the lecture was headed by Chara Lewis, a member of the Manchester based artist collective, Brass Art.

We came across a piece of their work in September last year at the Tatton Biennial entitled Flights of Fancy. For this, the collective exhibited a site specific inflatable sculpture called Trine Messenger (2012). Taking inspiration from classical images of Hypnos, the collective’s surreal piece was an amalgamation of each member’s face using 3D and 4D bio-medical facial scanning.  Sadly, when we visited Tatton Park, the sculpture had started to deflate so we did not get to see it all its glory. But from its documentation on the collective’s website I can see that this was clearly an impressive piece. The fact that it was stark white alludes to marble sculptures, almost as an echo of the inter-mingling of modern technology and classic art forms.

Trine Messenger at Tatton Park, 2012

A lot of their work revolves around the interplay between light and shadows. For example the series of watercolour silhouette drawings produced as part of ‘The Non-existence of the Unnamed’ (2010) series were exhibited in a dark room in which the artists installed just one light bulb. This brought the notion of shadows playing tricks on the mind to the audience whose own shadows would mingle with the figures on the wall. In this way, the drawings almost become an installation as it is as though the eerie silhouettes were emerging out of the canvas like some portal to another realm.

The Non-Existence of the Unnamed at The International 3 Gallery, 2010

I am interested in how the collective utilises space to play an active role in their installation. For example, the installation ‘Still Life No.1’ (2011) was a result of their ongoing fascination with 3D laser printing, with which they created miniature figurines of themselves. These figurines were displayed alongside other small scale sculptures made out of cheaper materials such as cellophane. They worked alongside a theatre technician to create a rotating table with its own light source on which to display the collection of objects. This gave the mini-sculptures a new dimension as the shadows created by the rotating table created ever-changing shadows on the walls of the gallery space, almost like a live shadow play. I think this is a lovely idea as the installation in itself was not particularly big but still the artists managed to fully utilise the space in an interactive manner. In this way, the difference between the expensive 3D printed figurines and the cellophane is lost entirely as the shadows cast on the walls reveal nothing of their origins.

Still Life No.1 at The Whitworth Art Gallery, 2011

*images taken from the artist's website