Event detail
image: Chloe Brown
A huge black cloud hovers in an empty industrial building. A tiny white mouse stands frozen to the spot in front of a roller, the type of machine used to flatten road surfaces. It is this combination of highly imaginative and provocative pieces that forms This Moment Here.
The helium-filled black cloud appears like an ominous presence trapped and enclosed within the gallery space, somehow reminiscent of the kind of black clouds found in cartoons such as ‘Peanuts’ - a harbinger of doom, a sign of depression or sadness hanging over the head of Charlie Brown.
Accompanying this is the confrontation between roller and taxidermied mouse. There is a resemblance to the iconic image of the ‘lone rebel’ standing in front of a line of tanks during the Tiananmen Square protests of June 5 1989. But it also echoes sequences in cartoons such as Tom & Jerry, where the protagonist is mowed down by something big and heavy squashing them flat. This is gallows humour treading a careful line between tragedy and comedy.
This Moment Here can be seen to follow in the tradition of Memento Mori, literally translated meaning ‘Remember you will die’, and it is this theme that has permeated Brown’s work throughout her artistic career. The show also continues Brown’s fascination with the filmic freeze frame, her use of taxidermy functioning as a form of three dimensional freeze frame. Brown says she is drawn to taxidermy “not because it symbolises death, but because it is death”.
Brown is developing an international reputation for using an eclectic and at times confrontational range of media. It is this ambitious combination of both familiar and yet unlikely sculptural materials that continues to make Brown’s work so compelling and refreshingly vital. The contemporary world often seems devoid of enchantment or imagination or perhaps the confidence to speculate about some home truths. This exhibition goes some way to offer the conditions for us to stop and consider these things. A world caught in a moment that is without conclusion but full of imaginative possibilities.
http://blocprojects.co.uk
