Cäcilia Brown
14 Mar - 03 May 2014
CÄCILIA BROWN
Wir sind doch keine Räuber, wir sind ja nicht einmal Diebe
14 March - 3 May 2014
One concrete sculpture holding the door ajar. The air is fresh and so thick. Light lightning; sculptures disappearing in a blinding white reappearing in the same spot with the magic of Meliès. A thick metallic drizzle covering everything in an anonymous colour. Styrofoam seats, an old wooden chair without legs on top of the sofa, exquisite wood cuts with bright colours and unused tools. The radio playing The residents. Words repeated endlessly. The news celebrating the order over the leftist punks. Everything is absorbed - I found myself in. A circus platform made of heavy concrete like in a humble house or a public building. Bottles drawing circles on the gravel by the pavement. The intelligent grey. Pola X’s melancholic industrial scene at the factory: dogs barking and metal doors opening; A big ensemble of rock musicians building up a sound that scavenges in our stomach. Outside, the old components of heavy machinery of a metal plant in Dunaujváros; metal grids protecting houses in the 8th district in Budapest – lost last pieces of metal adjoined – one can look but no one will get in; The memory of the hard edge aesthetics of constructivism in a shower cabinet. It’s passive communication, something I would call to look without looking; to look without demanding a sense; to suspend the rational and allow the body to acquire the experience of the object without interference from the rational - that is devoid of all the pre conceptions that come from the rational. There’s something affirmative (to be read as an interior force, while the rational is a reactive one) about the choices made in this cabinet. The popular knowledge of making functional decisions - empty sculptures that don’t talk to us and act like lost objects thrown into the river sieving the objects that follow the water invisible till then.
The door is open in 45 degrees - it rotates on its axis, drawing a perfect quarter of a circle in my imagination. Wandering through the 3 sculptures in the space, one repeats the circular movement, this time more human, lived and imperfect; spiral like, activating short memories of already seen or given again to see objects. We walk around the sculptures as much as we walk around meaning - there’s something puzzling about the way all the sculptures are absolutely open but impossible to live. We make curve lines on the floor surrounding the objects no matter if the form is an imperfect curve or a polyhedral construction. We look up, front and down as if it was an exercise of how to look at things or, if with the same language, one could make variations to say three different things. We are in the middle place. Art grows in between and lives from its relation between things. The sculptures of Cäcilia Brown are porous fields made with a big input from the outside, the openness to the other, a new language - already there and a new body capable to incorporate what is happening in front of her.
At the gallery (as a projection).
I was first afraid of the passage from the erotic environment of the studio to the aseptic space of the gallery. In an art gallery the Dionysian openness to the new to the multiple, to the other, fades because of the Apollonian form - the aimed absolute visibility – with the support of white walls, fluorescent lights and grey uniform floors, that can be seen as pornographic (Gombrowicz) as opposition to the above mentioned erotic quality. The possible dialogue between the already used metal - the form-function-solution, that escapes the cliché in art, and the door and vitrines of the gallery space couldn’t mark better this dichotomy of values between one and the other. The metal structures of Cäcilia Brown’s sculptures hold no glass, although they are in potency meant to be covered with it. Glass would insert us into the sculpture. Through glass one can see and can be seen. One can see himself / herself reflected and its surrounding environment. With these sculptures the promised reflection is denied. In silence one can feel that the sculptures demand autonomy from us viewers - an ethos (artistic, social and political) capable of holding the different echoes from the world out there.
Hugo Canoilas
Wir sind doch keine Räuber, wir sind ja nicht einmal Diebe
14 March - 3 May 2014
One concrete sculpture holding the door ajar. The air is fresh and so thick. Light lightning; sculptures disappearing in a blinding white reappearing in the same spot with the magic of Meliès. A thick metallic drizzle covering everything in an anonymous colour. Styrofoam seats, an old wooden chair without legs on top of the sofa, exquisite wood cuts with bright colours and unused tools. The radio playing The residents. Words repeated endlessly. The news celebrating the order over the leftist punks. Everything is absorbed - I found myself in. A circus platform made of heavy concrete like in a humble house or a public building. Bottles drawing circles on the gravel by the pavement. The intelligent grey. Pola X’s melancholic industrial scene at the factory: dogs barking and metal doors opening; A big ensemble of rock musicians building up a sound that scavenges in our stomach. Outside, the old components of heavy machinery of a metal plant in Dunaujváros; metal grids protecting houses in the 8th district in Budapest – lost last pieces of metal adjoined – one can look but no one will get in; The memory of the hard edge aesthetics of constructivism in a shower cabinet. It’s passive communication, something I would call to look without looking; to look without demanding a sense; to suspend the rational and allow the body to acquire the experience of the object without interference from the rational - that is devoid of all the pre conceptions that come from the rational. There’s something affirmative (to be read as an interior force, while the rational is a reactive one) about the choices made in this cabinet. The popular knowledge of making functional decisions - empty sculptures that don’t talk to us and act like lost objects thrown into the river sieving the objects that follow the water invisible till then.
The door is open in 45 degrees - it rotates on its axis, drawing a perfect quarter of a circle in my imagination. Wandering through the 3 sculptures in the space, one repeats the circular movement, this time more human, lived and imperfect; spiral like, activating short memories of already seen or given again to see objects. We walk around the sculptures as much as we walk around meaning - there’s something puzzling about the way all the sculptures are absolutely open but impossible to live. We make curve lines on the floor surrounding the objects no matter if the form is an imperfect curve or a polyhedral construction. We look up, front and down as if it was an exercise of how to look at things or, if with the same language, one could make variations to say three different things. We are in the middle place. Art grows in between and lives from its relation between things. The sculptures of Cäcilia Brown are porous fields made with a big input from the outside, the openness to the other, a new language - already there and a new body capable to incorporate what is happening in front of her.
At the gallery (as a projection).
I was first afraid of the passage from the erotic environment of the studio to the aseptic space of the gallery. In an art gallery the Dionysian openness to the new to the multiple, to the other, fades because of the Apollonian form - the aimed absolute visibility – with the support of white walls, fluorescent lights and grey uniform floors, that can be seen as pornographic (Gombrowicz) as opposition to the above mentioned erotic quality. The possible dialogue between the already used metal - the form-function-solution, that escapes the cliché in art, and the door and vitrines of the gallery space couldn’t mark better this dichotomy of values between one and the other. The metal structures of Cäcilia Brown’s sculptures hold no glass, although they are in potency meant to be covered with it. Glass would insert us into the sculpture. Through glass one can see and can be seen. One can see himself / herself reflected and its surrounding environment. With these sculptures the promised reflection is denied. In silence one can feel that the sculptures demand autonomy from us viewers - an ethos (artistic, social and political) capable of holding the different echoes from the world out there.
Hugo Canoilas