November 28, 2024
Rachael Browning
This Way Up
Moskowitz Bayse
October 26 - December 14, 2024
Rachael Browning
For her third solo exhibition at Moskowitz Bayse, Rachael Browning continues to explore photographic truths and ambiguities. In This Way Up, she presents photographs and drawings that inform as well as obfuscate. Her 2022 show Pushing Rope investigated entropy through the addition of supports to anchor objects in nooks where windows used to be. Minor Adjustments was a body of work from 2020 where she intervened in the natural landscape. Using rope, turn buckles, straps and miscellaneous hardware in primary colors, Browing made slight adjustments to trees, rocks, flowers and expanses of ground in an attempt to make them level.
The works in This Way Up continue these somewhat absurd investigations. There is a bit of play, as well as a question of which came first when regarding the photographs and the works on paper. The archival pigment print #120 06 (all works 2024) is a photograph of a rectangular piece of light blue green foam on top of thinner pink foam that has been wrapped around masonite. Held together by a piece of thin and maybe stretchy pinkish-red rope or string, the entire bundle is set on a black ground. An image of the same sized and title in graphite, colored pencil and pastel on paper reinterprets the photograph by transforming it into lines and textures that, not replicating the photograph exactly, act as a graphical representation that reduces the shapes to flattened areas but other in ways becomes a more complex rendering.
Comparing the drawn and photographic versions of #126 03 also reveals thoughtful variations. In the photograph, Browning positions a folded rectangular black packing blanket against a square black background. On top of the blanket is a rolled cylinder of the same material, about the same length and around one third the width. Sandwiched perpendicularly between these two objects is a thin rectangle of industrial black non-slip flooring with protruding ovals. The entire "sculpture" is held together at the bottom of the composition with a light gray cord. In the drawing, Browning carefully reproduces the zigzag pattern of the blanket as white lines against a black pastel ground. The ovals are precisely drawn into a darker black section. The quasi-abstract rendering retains the photographs three-dimensionality, yet it is obviously flat.
Browning's constructions are funky arrangements of banal industrial materials that investigate shape, texture and form. When photographed, attention is paid to light and shadow. Seen in relation to their drawn counterparts, the photographs become more nuanced as the eye, as well as the mind goes back and forth between the two versions, comparing and contrasting the compositions, materials, textures and inclusivity of the transformation. Throughout the eight pairs (which are purposely not hung side by side), there is never an exact one to one relationship, but rather associations that suggest interpretation. In #124 03 for example, a taught spring extends between two eyebolts that are attached to a concave shaped piece of oriented strand board (a type of engineered wood similar to plywood). For the drawing, Browning inverts the image so the wood becomes a black shape centered on tan-toned hand-marbled paper. It is criss-crossed by multiple perspective lines extending out from the edges of each object.
The exhibition text (press release) is a long list of opposites that might be used to interpret and understand the works— light & dark, negative & positive, cause & effect, reveal & conceal. Rather than explain what and why, Browning wants her viewers to look, to compare and contrast, and to marvel at the nuances that can be extracted through the combination of simple forms and materials.
This Way Up
Moskowitz Bayse
October 26 - December 14, 2024
Rachael Browning
For her third solo exhibition at Moskowitz Bayse, Rachael Browning continues to explore photographic truths and ambiguities. In This Way Up, she presents photographs and drawings that inform as well as obfuscate. Her 2022 show Pushing Rope investigated entropy through the addition of supports to anchor objects in nooks where windows used to be. Minor Adjustments was a body of work from 2020 where she intervened in the natural landscape. Using rope, turn buckles, straps and miscellaneous hardware in primary colors, Browing made slight adjustments to trees, rocks, flowers and expanses of ground in an attempt to make them level.
The works in This Way Up continue these somewhat absurd investigations. There is a bit of play, as well as a question of which came first when regarding the photographs and the works on paper. The archival pigment print #120 06 (all works 2024) is a photograph of a rectangular piece of light blue green foam on top of thinner pink foam that has been wrapped around masonite. Held together by a piece of thin and maybe stretchy pinkish-red rope or string, the entire bundle is set on a black ground. An image of the same sized and title in graphite, colored pencil and pastel on paper reinterprets the photograph by transforming it into lines and textures that, not replicating the photograph exactly, act as a graphical representation that reduces the shapes to flattened areas but other in ways becomes a more complex rendering.
Comparing the drawn and photographic versions of #126 03 also reveals thoughtful variations. In the photograph, Browning positions a folded rectangular black packing blanket against a square black background. On top of the blanket is a rolled cylinder of the same material, about the same length and around one third the width. Sandwiched perpendicularly between these two objects is a thin rectangle of industrial black non-slip flooring with protruding ovals. The entire "sculpture" is held together at the bottom of the composition with a light gray cord. In the drawing, Browning carefully reproduces the zigzag pattern of the blanket as white lines against a black pastel ground. The ovals are precisely drawn into a darker black section. The quasi-abstract rendering retains the photographs three-dimensionality, yet it is obviously flat.
Browning's constructions are funky arrangements of banal industrial materials that investigate shape, texture and form. When photographed, attention is paid to light and shadow. Seen in relation to their drawn counterparts, the photographs become more nuanced as the eye, as well as the mind goes back and forth between the two versions, comparing and contrasting the compositions, materials, textures and inclusivity of the transformation. Throughout the eight pairs (which are purposely not hung side by side), there is never an exact one to one relationship, but rather associations that suggest interpretation. In #124 03 for example, a taught spring extends between two eyebolts that are attached to a concave shaped piece of oriented strand board (a type of engineered wood similar to plywood). For the drawing, Browning inverts the image so the wood becomes a black shape centered on tan-toned hand-marbled paper. It is criss-crossed by multiple perspective lines extending out from the edges of each object.
The exhibition text (press release) is a long list of opposites that might be used to interpret and understand the works— light & dark, negative & positive, cause & effect, reveal & conceal. Rather than explain what and why, Browning wants her viewers to look, to compare and contrast, and to marvel at the nuances that can be extracted through the combination of simple forms and materials.