Output details

Viewfinder international print exhibition

brook & black’s participation in Viewfinder, both in the work presented and contribution to the Symposium, lies in their ongoing enquiry in the link between captured digital imagery and its translation into, onto and as part of other structures, whether 2d or 3d. In Viewfinder, brook & black exhibited video work, large digital prints and a digital image printed on silk. The making of new ‘translations’ of an image across a different surface, enables us to question how technical issues and the medium interrupt and modify our perception of a work. In ‘Counterpane’ the linked hexagons of separately filmed video of water create a digital surface of light, projected onto a bed, this theme is revisited in ‘Venetian quilt’, a still version of hexagonal images photographed in Venice and printed on silk. The liquid fabric moves as visitors pass, and raises questions of travel, trade and history, along with those of surface, decorative and conceptual art. In ‘Bagatelle Parallel’ the luscious painted surfaces of Fragonard’s ‘The Swing’, collaged in a giclee print with a video still of taken from inside the Rococo interior of the Chateau de Bagatelle in Paris contrasts the immediate urgent appeal to the senses of paint, juxtaposed with more distant, contemporary, electronic impression of the video still. In ‘Life Raft’, digital software image manipulation (e.g.the stretch tool of Adobe Photoshop) is juxtaposed with photographic and C19 sculptural surfaces, exploring and exploiting the sense of rupture and shift involved in reading contemporary imagery. In ‘Loco Solis I & II’ photographic images developed from those taken by the Hubble telescope of deepest space are juxtaposed with the Enlightenment’s geometric surfaces and microscopic photographs of the eye.

brook & black are a collaborative partnership who share equally the intellectual and practical aspects of their research-led artistic practice.