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Le Regard Clos

Le Regard Clos, a solo exhibition and curated event by brook & black was commissioned by Madame Dyvenck, the museum Director, for the galleries and site of the Musee Toulouse-Lautrec (MTL), Albi, France as part of the ‘Night of the Museums’, a national, annual event enabling audiences to visit historic collections and museums beyond normal visiting hours and in new, imaginative ways.
The event and exhibition was located in and around the Lautrec collection, with invited participation from activist poet laureate for Derbyshire, Matt Black, who performed, in collaboration with students from Rodez University; an ‘Orchestration Poetique’, based on deconstructed texts by Rimbaud. Artist/writer Vicky Morris devised an interactive collecting of the public’s reveries and reflections, in response to Lautrec’s works. Over the course of five hours, their words were delivered with digital, looped musical improvisation from DJ-Only Michael, a Sheffield based sound artist and musician, to produce a spontaneous participatory performance by and for the audience. This work was curated by brook & black.
During the opening night, brook & black undertook a public participation work using four hundred and eighty small hand-fabricated windmills, built, with the public, into a large-scale interactive windmill-shaped floor work in the courtyard entrance to the MTL. A new video work, Le Regard Clos, considering Lautrec’s Self-Portrait (1882) was hung, framed, in the ‘Salon des Portraits’, and within the gallery nearby a contemporary 'audio-zoetrope’ was placed, referencing Lautrec’s drawing; Woman Pulling Up her Stocking (1894). On the opening night over 2,000 people attended.

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