Still life No. 1 (Dark Matters: Shadow, Technology, Art)

Brass Art are Chara Lewis, Kristin Mojsiewicz and Anneke Pettican. They have worked together since 1998 and have exhibited widely throughout Europe, the USA and Australia. Brass Art explore the potential of combining old and new media through strategies of proto-cinematic optical illusion and cutting edge digital technologies.
For Dark Matters, Brass Art have been commissioned to create a new installation for the Whitworth’s imposing Mezzanine Court. Looming figures and monstrous fusions invoke an immediate affiliation with the nineteenth century phantasmagoria. A simple, travelling light source casts a slowly spinning cavalcade of shadow around the walls and ceiling. Central to the piece, entitled Still Life No. 1, is a table bearing an arrangement of museum specimens, tiny figurines and cellophane – their varying opacities against the bare bulb producing the silhouettes and glimmers which create the play of forms. The tiny figures upon the table are three dimensional representations of the artists themselves, rendered using the latest digital techniques. Through basic tricks of the light they become players in a complex narrative of animal, human and geological interaction

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