Review PERTH

But No Metaphors
Kristen Brownfield: Teeter
Gallery Central 2016

But no metaphors. Nothing is like anything else. Things are themselves entirely and do not need interpretation, only a minimal respect for their precise integrity. The mark on the wall is two feet three inches wide and four feet eight and a fraction inches high. Already I have failed to be completely accurate. I must write "fraction" because I can't read the little numbers on the ruler without my glasses which I never wear. Gore Vidal- Myra Breckinridge

Brownfields praxis embodies this ‘integrity’, it is as considered as it is laboured.
Ephemeral in nature there is an ongoing contingency to Brownfields work, it is ever changing whether an intimate stack to room staged installation. Each component may seem individually insignificant, domestic in scale, trash. It is however accumulatively when these pieces come together in various configurations which she has worked and re-worked that they reach a clarity of form, More like paintings, layered through the her reconfiguration with there strength being in there multiplicity. You can tell Brownfields understanding of aesthetics and where it sits inside the language of abstraction is a learnt experience, this isn’t an exercise in design placement, there is a discipline and inventiveness to her work that comes only through an ongoing engagement with failure.

There are several ideas that are consistent across Brownfields work, she works with a reductive palette both in terms of its colour and structural value. The colours are mis- tints, other peoples discards that she reclaims from local hardware’s. Her palette/ the work is made up from the left overs of our contemporary culture, it is important to emphasis there is no monetary value to the pieces Brownfield uses, they don’t look like anything, neither is she trying to make them “look like anything” they are what they are and celebrated for that.

These work(s) operate as a proposition a kind of open source set of configurations that are labored to work with or mimic their architectural foundation. It is mutable and changeable and always self referential, with each installation referencing a patina of something before it. Relying on this additive and subtractive process to activate the work. Materials are divorced from their original purpose and become a part of the process of the work like a expanded contemporary merz, where tension is derived from the connection between objects and their foundations. As arrangements she creates intimate moments, she works with tension and suspense, utilizing almost theatre type trickery they form part of a time line of events where there is seemingly no beginning or end however they definitely find their origins in the studio where she constructs and re assembles the various components that come to form Teeter.

"Leading from a residency at ECU, Teeter employs up-cycled materials to investigate relations between painting, object & space. Responding directly to the space, this exhibition reveals an ongoing interest in material language and the potential to examine architectural surroundings"

https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Kristen-Brownfield--Teeter/C2DE21F9336AF6F4

Photo by Jayde Willis