Storage Facility. Ben Branagan

About

Branagan’s processes digest culture, and the systems we employ to navigate and recount the world around us. Presenting itself as a bastard archeology, ‘Storage Facility’ is a visceral exploration of knowledge, in forms and mediums that employ a playful, responsive approach to materials and situations.

Often working with the overlooked, abandoned or surplus; his work teases out connections and associations between things; both visual and conceptual, real and imagined, accidental or essential. Branagan presents us with a process of making, collating and reordering an understanding of the world, stitched together from fragments of material, culture and experience.

Responding directly to the space, at the heart of the exhibition is a display of ambiguous artifacts formed from the pulped remains of discarded books. Created with an ad hoc and improvised approach to form, the molded shapes draw on a wide range of sources; from contemporary design and traditional crafts to ancient standing stones and vernacular architecture. Examining the methods we employ to store and recall cultural knowledge, this idiosyncratic collection creates an alternative archive of the information these now redundant containers once held, returning them to an object making tradition that is prehistoric, pre-literate.

Alongside this display will be recent collages from the ongoing series ‘Possible Disasters’. Drawn from the silt like build up of images that surround us, the collages present speculative forms that suggest themselves from a heap of disparate parts that overlap and intermingle. Repeating shapes and contours echo and lurk, building and layering through the series like after images to create a fleeting, fragmentary and chaotic view of the world. A possible, partial, subjective repository of forms.