CLEAVE

An exhibition of Lorna Brown
The exhibition runs from September 16 to October 17, 1999

Lorna Brown’s installations often combine several media, including photography, sound, text, video and sculptural elements. In her highly original practice, a work’s meaning emerges both from the confrontation of materials or media, and in the clash of iconographs or symbols. The exhibition Cleave brings together four works: Gravid, Cleave (sandbag, rocks, cleat and concrete), Little Girl and Cleave (book).

Gravid is a video installation consisting of two monitors displaying the arms of an absent body, carrying feathers on one side and a rock on the other. The tape loop maintains a stubborn persistence; the arms vacillate but never release their hold. In a completely different but equally paradoxical fashion, Little Girl explores the idea of weight, in an impossible performance: plastic straps, like those found on ordinary sandals, are attached to thick marble soles; an aggressively burlesque slingshot is juxtaposed alongside these odd shoes. In counterpoint to this satirical tone, we have the series of enlarged photographs entitled Cleave. Objects commonly used to anchor a boat have been placed in an unmade bed, which invokes the sea with the sensuous drape of its velvet covers. Incongruous objects — a sack of cement, rocks, an anchor — lie where the sheet is still marked by the fresh trace of a body. Echoing these objects, an open book lies in place of pillows at the head of the bed. In the starkly minimalist blank pages of the book we can just make out the embossed word "cleave," so that even when it is closed, a hollow or absence lies at the heart of the book.

The word "cleave" can signify either "to adhere firmly" or "to sever", hence to separate or split. Lorna Brown’s project draws its inspiration from this paradox by simultaneously exploring notions of attachment, fidelity and separation. A bittersweet commentary on love, on the inevitable weight of things, emerges from the juxtaposition of these works.

Born in 1958, Lorna Brown lives and works in Vancouver. Her works have been shown in several individual exhibitions, including Character (Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver, 1993), Once Removed (Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, 1992), Affect (Gallery 44, Toronto, 1991) and Reading (Artspeak Gallery, Vancouver, 1990). She has also participated in group exhibitions including Vancouver Perspectives (Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, 1997 and Yokohama Citizens Gallery, Yokohama, 1996), Urban Fictions (Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver, 1996), RX: Taking Our Medicine (Agnes Etherington Arts Centre, Kingston, 1995) and Les cent jours d’art contemporain, Vision 91 (Centre international d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montréal, 1991). Lorna Brown taught for several years at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and Simon Fraser University’s School for Contemporary Arts, and is presently director of Artspeak Gallery in Vancouver.