Trickster
Chloe Brenan | Alexandra Brunt
1st – 17th December
Catalyst Arts is delighted to announce details of it’s recent members open call ‘Trickster’ featuring Dublin based artists Chloe Brenan and Alexandra Brunt. Opening 6PM, Thursday 1st December
The trickster is a mythological entity or archetype, indicative of absurd or destabilising re-evaluations of perception and its limitations. The work of both artists explore ideas of rearranging perceptual modes to break down and ultimately reassemble conceptions of self and objective reality respectively.
Dublin based artist Alexandra Brunt presents a series of three recent Sound works. These artworks explore Brunt’s interest in perception, phenomenology and consider the fabrication of participatory experience through sound. Through the Juxtaposition of object, body and the female voice the artworks depict a playful yet sinister dialogue of the immaterial subject matter embodied within the work. Her artworks challenge states of reality and physiological phenomena, with particular focus on cultural modes of fragmentation, agency and structures of power.
The work of Chloe Brenan tends to hinge on minimalist interactions with objects and surfaces, often stepping between the languages of text, moving image, print, installation and analogue photographic media.The Hole In The Donut is a moving image piece that explores the representation and destabilization of linear conceptions of time. Astrological phenomena serve as points of reference; celestial orbits and cycles, lunar/solar eclipses, and the periodic alignment of planets in the sky. The piece addresses the absurd, futile and melancholic human need to make sense, order and pattern out of a vast, often chaotic, universe.
These phenomena are considered by way of an investigation into the limits of analogue photographic media, utilizing structural filmmaking techniques such as fixed framing, accelerated shutter speed, close up shots, slow motion, and the polyrhythmic use of three conflicting rhythms. Circular props of various sizes, which act as frames for negative space, are dropped in front of a 16mm camera camera lens in a particular order so that it fleetingly captures what they eye cannot see. The descending objects are then edited into a triptych of three separate rhythmic pieces, played out alongside one another. The cascading objects and sounds, though initially in unison, immediately begin to fall out of sync, eventually realigning, only to dissolve into disharmony once again. This elliptical process repeats infinitely. The loops act as interruptions to linear forward movement, and instead, like planets within a solar system, the objects are bound together in a diverging and intersecting, contrapunctal system. The space created by these loops is that of a perpetual present, emphasized by the torus shaped objects that in themselves have no beginning or end point. Conversely, the series Resonance Overlaps takes its title from a particular phenomenon in celestial mechanics that sees the diffusion or breakdown of planetary orbits; where the synchronous spin paths of two orbiting satellites intersect, exerting a regular, periodic gravitational influence on each other. This produces an orbital eccentricity, or ‘chaotic sea’ in which spin orbits are broken down and from which new paths are created. This dissolution of order into disharmony, and vice versa, is explored through the use of roller marks, typically utilized in the preparation stage of printmaking. Various inked lines intersect at irregular intervals, producing a series of marks that exist somewhere in between a grid or net structure coming into focus or dissolving into a haze.
