Visitors
Vanessa Brown
GALLERY 295
August 28 - December 5, 2015
Moving from a sculptural practice into a two-dimensional image, Vanessa Brown presents us with a gestural investigation in the way she builds on her understanding of visual and sculptural planes. In Visitors, we are faced with the monolithic flatness of an image space compounded by the gestural removal of negative space. Substituting a selection tool for a plasma-cutter and a solid colour space for sheet steel, Brown flattens her sculptural practice even further into the photographic plane and presents it at a scale that relates to a sculptural relationship to the body.
Brown highlights the sculptural element that the photographic image can claim in how images present physical space as a composition of planes through a certain forced uni-focal perspective. In generating a work for the Light-Box Project Space, Brown recognizes that the tools of digital photographic software mirror those that she uses when working with sculpture. Brown is compelled to leave traces of the tools she used, keeping the gesture of her unsteady hand recorded uncorrected. She does so overtop a series of images taken from a visit to Waimea Canyon, Kauai, presenting the 6th iteration within the light-box itself. On this island Brown takes an understanding of the landscape from her sculptural practice into the realm of the photographic act. For Brown, the monolithic blue void that blocks our view parallels her removal from the scene and her circumstantial inability to enjoy the serene beauty. Brown considers this simultaneous attraction to and removal from a location parallel to the methodological flow of translating a sculptural practice to one that is located in digital photo collage.
Exhibition text by Patryk Stasieczek, co-curated with Mike Love.