brook & black is an art partnership which brings together a combination of skills rooted in fine art practice: installation, sound, video, printmaking, photography and sculpture. From a process of research, and experimentation we work with made and found objects, light and sound to engage the viewer through intervening in the structure of space. This can lead to work made in response to site, where site can be external, or located within a building, its fabric or the suggested or at time location within an historical painting. Several core themes may be traced within the work: layers of human experience within structured or built space; memory and the passing of time; the fluidity and transformational aspects of water; the expressive and still surprising force of light and shadow.
The nature of temporality found in the digital environment, converging with the sense of time and reflection offered by the drawn line or painted gesture, suggests how our own physicality is poised between two states. We oscillate between the digital and the physical, between the transient and the fixed. These echo with what is public and what is private; where experience is informed by something we might see as the fury of the outside world in contrast to what we see as everyday.
Our human experience is ever more mediated by technology, to the extent that we now have online and off-line lives, avatars profiles and personalities. While older, slower creative technologies took us closer to the process of a physical present, in front of a screen or laptop our thoughts are projected into a disembodied, infinite space of ceaselessly shifting images and events. The existential anxiety that results from our attempts to reconcile these two modes of living are only just starting to be felt. For example, with raised mental health disorders in young people and the sense of disenfranchisement of many older people.
This work addresses the encounter of these two realities, projected one to the other in the gallery space. The first video projection is of a drawing of a place, a still image made from ink pressed into paper, a line of thought. It is the result of contemplation, observation and a conclusion drawn from a period of extended concentration. The second projection is of six video sequences of six journeys, sourced almost randomly from the internet – that represent the globally dispersed references cumulatively building on-line into a shared, uploaded mirror-world. The suspended frame defines a space where both these versions of a place and time meet, rather than being overlaid one over the other, here they encounter each other from the opposite side, they come up against each other, converging on the thin membrane of the projection film.
The rather anthropomorphic character of the projectors, set on their supports, creates a resonance with the practice of the artists, two separate creative minds working against and with each other, each contributing their energy, ideas and perspective. brook & black have worked together since 2003 and continue to negotiate, create and dream up works that neither artist would, nor could, have created alone. In their work over the years brook and black frequently explore this interaction of the physical and the digital. They often juxtapose architectural, sculptural and physical elements with video, projection and sound, activating a space that allows the audience to make new connections of narrative and emotion.
