So I was quite surprised to find out that we'd gone on the first day of the new Matti Braun exhibition. I'd never heard of this artist before, so I was interested to see some of his works.
The first gallery was a bit mixed for me as it was full of ink paintings, that I could appreciate after working the previous week with ink, but it felt a bit overkill as this whole first room was nearly completely full of these similar looking works. Plus without much context they didn't mean much, they almost looked like Rorschach tests.
But the next room which contained the work R.T./S.R./V.S. was amazing, visually and conceptually. The whole floor was covered in water with a series of logs poking out of the water, available for you to walk over from one side of the room to the other. It held your attention as soon as you saw it and to walk over was not only fun and interactive but it really helped you to understand the concept of the piece. A lot of the pieces in the exhibition were related to development work that Braun did for a film which was later abandoned, but the script was said to be the inspiration for the film E.T. and in the original script the alien crashes in a lake. When talking about R.T./S.R./V.S. to an attendee of the gallery I found out that the logs aren't native to Bristol and had to be transported there and so link into displacement themes related to culture and movement. Because of this when crossing the logs I thought about the meaning of them more, how I felt trepidation when moving across them, of not wanting to upset the calm water, of only seeing the surface of the foreign logs, you couldn't see beneath them and of having to negotiate the crossing with other people. Moving from one side to the other really seemed like the movement from one culture to another and the merging of them.
Photos of R.T./S.R./V.S
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| Lucy illustrates how the logs work |
Matti Braun: Gost Log is on at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol until the 6th January 2013.
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