About
Brass Art explore actual and virtual space by positioning themselves as shadows, ghosted forms, reflections and miniature models. Central to their work is an examination of thresholds, of public and private space, often using their own bodies in real or constructed situations to manipulate, distort and inhabit liminal zones. Their practice incorporates sculpture, installation, video, drawing and performative elements.
Employing the latest digital technology whilst simultaneously conjuring ideas relating back to pre-electronic spectacle, such as shadow-play, magic lanterns and zoetropes, they entice the projective imagination into an arcane alternative reality. Technology is used to morph the artists' shadows: the addition of wings is an often repeated motif which grows out of a long mythic tradition of women changing shape and form.
This exhibition comprises new work developed over two years in discussion with Yorkshire Sculpture Park. For Moments of Death and Revival the artists have had
their bodies scanned and printed in three-dimensions to produce reduced-size replicas. These figures, arranged together with other 3D printed objects, props, animals and metamorphic elements form a procession which is then lit by a light source attached
to a model train. Moving shadows are thrown across the gallery walls in a work that references carnival and danse macabre, exploring an often uneasy and disconcerting relationship with miniature realities, doubles, doppelgängers and animated dolls.
The new video work Between the Angels and the Beasts approaches shadows
from a different perspective, placing an imaginary world between the artists and the landscape, where their physical bodies are absent but their presence is signalled through interference in, and control over, the âreal'. Digitally created cloud formations
are introduced and fires started which at times obscure the view of the image. Produced as a mirrored image, the work plays with our sense of reality and tendency
to pareidolia (seeing recognisable forms in abstract shapes).
In the second new video piece, Out of Thin Air, the digitally rendered shadow of a hot air balloon moves slowly across a suburban landscape. A soundtrack of voices and noises from unseen and impossibly close sources is audible throughout, as is the rhythmic sound of the balloon's burner. We are left wondering what is real and what
is a construct.
Also on display is a series of watercolour drawings in which the artists encounter the manifestation of their psyche, their posed shadows mixing with those cast by hands and other objects to explore the metamorphic possibilities of shadow-play.
