Light, lasers and lenses: Brass Art bring an immersive summer-long exhibition to HOME

A new collection of work from Brass Art spanning immersive video, sculpture and lens-based media comes to HOME throughout summer.

rock, quiver and bend explores how light transforms materials through the use of analogue, digital and laser-based forms of capture.

The display will see light digitally rake through the house, garden and writing room of Virginia Woolf, transforming suspended silver landscapes, and illuminating portraits of the artists disguised in cellophane.

this voice; this life; this procession, a mesmeric video work, developed after visiting Woolf’s writing shed at Monk’s House, forms a key part of the exhibition. Normally closed to the public, Brass Art were permitted to access to scan themselves inside the famed creative space and surrounding garden using laser technology.

Woolf’s creative writing strategies such as the use of streams of consciousness, atemporality, defamiliarization and her descriptions of fragmented versions of reality, have all inspired the artists’ approach to creating the film, which is accompanied by an electroacoustic soundscape by composer Annie Mahtani.

The Apparition series has been developed following research into pre-cinematic spectacle. Using coloured cellophane as a way of “seeing the mundane world”, the artists disguise themselves to create ‘grotesque portrait sillhouettes’, paying homage to the Modernist yet distinctly proto-feminist set designs of Florine Stettheimer.

The sculptural installation, the torrent of things grown so familiar, blends Brass Art’s intrigue of geology, erratic boulders and meteors, as markers of deep time and space, with the collective’s interest in the transformation of readily available, inexpensive materials such as foil blanket.

In these sculptures, focus shifts between the exterior silver surface of the foil and the illuminated interior worlds which have been created using digitally scanned botanical models.

Brass Art have also produced a new animated text work for HOME, flooding the front space with pulses of colour. Described a mediation on life, death and the creative impetus, the installation echoes the phrase ‘this voice this life this procession’ in neon medium.

Brass Art: rock, quiver and bend runs from Sun 2 Jun – Sun 1 Sep at HOME’s Ground Floor Gallery. Entry is free and a special preview evening will be taking place on Sat 1 Jun from 6pm – 9pm. For more information, and to book your free tickets, click the button below.