The Song Remains the Same

June 22 — August 6, 2022, Trish Clark Gallery

Incorporating video, sculptural constructions, photography and found objects, the song remains the same raises pertinent questions surrounding the state of geo-politics, big media, systems of power, the human condition and our relationship to place. Works include interplanetary-style flybys of laptop packaging, video from a home-made subatomic particle detector and laser-cut army blankets.

A recent work, with the artist’s text laser-cut into its patched woolen surface, Israeli Army Blanket (2020) highlights the macro- and micro- elements of ‘everyday’ wars: violence, displacement and shelter. Ten Thousand Years (2018), laboriously and beautifully hand-felted by Brennan, depicts the Soviet medal awarded at the time of the 1986 Chernobyl Disaster in Ukraine, flanked by medals presented 20 and 30 years later. A late-Soviet design showing a drop of blood transected by an alpha, a beta and a gamma ray, the Chernobyl Liquidator’s medal commemorates those who worked on the toxic clean-up of the devastated power plant. The medals’ shifting design and wording traces the semantic drift re-framing the most deadly nuclear accident of all time. The Pacific Century (2018) utilizes robot live-feed from inside one of the destroyed nuclear reactors at Fukushima. Every room I have ever been in (2012 and ongoing), is more personal, an ever-growing cord threading together keys of every room the artist has occupied.

Underneath and Flag of Convenience (2012) are hand-stiched polyester wipes,  soaked with inky dye. Brennan stitched these stained quilts of theoretically disposable textile in the fog of early motherhood.

Stella Brennan in conversation with Hanna Scott and Hamish Coney.