Kaucyila Brooke
dal 18/4/2012 al 16/6/2012
Segnalato da
18/4/2012
Kaucyila Brooke
Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe
Do You Want Me To Draw You A Diagram? The selection for her first comprehensive solo exhibition in Germany ranges from early works from the 1980s, which have rarely been seen, to new works that Brooke has conceived especially for this exhibition. Her work is concerned with the mechanisms of power and representation and asks what possibilities exist for the individual to interrupt the dominant cultural codes.
Badischer Kunstverein is pleased to present American artist Kaucyila Brooke in her first comprehensive solo exhibition in Germany. The selection ranges from early works from the 1980s, which have rarely been seen, to new works that Brooke has conceived especially for this exhibition. Brooke’s central medium is photography, which she also uses in collages of text and images. She also works with installations, drawings, and videos.
Kaucyila Brooke’s work is concerned with the mechanisms of power and representation and asks what possibilities exist for the individual to interrupt the dominant cultural codes. In a group of works from the 1980s and 1990s, the determining principle is a montage of photos and text juxtaposing the patterns of traditional historiography with a formal language from popular and media culture, as in the expansive photo collage Tit for Twat (1993, ongoing), in Unknown Deviancies (What a Dish!) (1989) or Making the Most of Your Backyard: The Story Behind an Ideal Beauty (1991). Stylistically, these panels of images and text take their lead from the narrative strategies of popular photo novellas and early cartoon strips. The structure of some of the images also recalls votive paintings or illuminated manuscripts. The photographs are staged; the texts are written by hand, then cut out and pasted on – a physical method for montage that corresponds to the performative nature of the works in space. At the same time, it reveals the influence of the film and media theories that have shaped the artist’s work, as have feminist and queer approaches and analyses of biology and gender based on cultural theory. In her central work Tit for Twat, for example, the artist develops an alternative creation myth in which not Adam and Eve but the two women Madam and Eve find each other in the Gardenof Paradiseand set off on a journey of discovery through the global world of culture and media. Brooke has conceived nine new panels for this work that are being premiered at Badischer Kunstverein.
A second group of works in this exhibition is dedicated to photographic series and addresses issues of documentation and archiving. Brooke employs the format of the photographic document as an open form that incorporates rifts, voids, and omissions and questions the boundaries of a conventional transmission of knowledge. For Kathy Acker’s Clothes (1999–2004), Brooke photographed 154 different pieces of clothing that belonged to the American writer, who died in 1997. Hanging on simple clothes hangers and photographed against a neutral background, the clothes capture the author’s succinct style and her mise-en-scène of her sexual identity. At the same time, the traces of wear and the movement with which Brooke animates some of the clothing make the absence of a body palpable. The photo series After Morandi and After GLH(2012), conceived especially for this exhibition, similarily runs through the possibilities of a private matter in absence of the subject. The artist’s own collection of vases is staged as still lifes in the style of the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi and presented in new arrangements. As in Morandi’s work, Brooke’s vases are composed with a restrained palette and evoke a similar sense of melancholy, of ephemerality, but also of the elegant self-confidence of quotidian design.
In the Kunstverein’s so-called Waldstrassensaal, a selection from the artist’s working archive is being presented for the first time. Many of these materials relate to Brooke’s early works of the 1980s and illuminate her interest in structure and dialogue but also reveals her diverse techniques for the montage of text and images. In a series of drawings titled Do You Want Me to Draw You a Diagram? (2004-2006), the artist playfully analyzes in diagrams the thematic and formal connections between her works. These drawings delineate the architectural structure of the projects and the code to access the artistic practice of Kaucyila Brooke.
With special thanks to Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna.
Image: Kaucyila Brooke, Spirals, 2012, from Can We Talk?, Tit for Twat, 1993 ongoing. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna.
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Opening: Thursday, 19 April, 7 pm
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