Exhibition
Take me anywhere, I don't care. I don't care - Gooden Gallery
The work of the Sean Branagan has a suggestion of the impossible, but plausible. He describes the world we know in contrarian communication methods, not the way we know from the comfortable traditional communicational methods of the social order. Sean breaches what’s real.
As a vehicle for ‘time’, ‘light’ and ‘movement’ (elements as valid to his practice as more conventional ones in painting like line, form and colour) the role of the projector has been variously considered in past work. For example, it was built inside the work in the LIGHT FORMS series, it was suspended closely overhead on clamps in works like 'Peep Show' and 'Where the Sun is Silent' (pieces recently seen in the group show PHYSICOLOGY at this gallery).
In those pieces light was always applied to the surface (via the projector) This exhibition sees the adoption of LCD screens, allowing light and movement to emanate from within the work. However, light is also applied externally onto the work; these paintings are lit from the front, and are to be seen in the full light of the gallery space, as in any other painting show.
the ribbon
Sean Branagan describes the urge in his studio to hold one end of a ribbon and throw the other end outwards, through and into the work. This feels less about creating a navigable bridge between the tangible and intangible (because this assumes a difference, or a journey, that takes you from one thing, to another, different thing - the conceptual world of the painting and his own reality) it is more about an orchestration of seeing and feeling the work homogenously, about embracing the idea that perhaps there is no difference, perhaps there is only one thing – ‘The Real’.
In ‘Constructs in the Mind of a Sceptic’, lines of drawing are conventionally applied onto the Perspex, as a painter might apply them to his canvas, but then they are also (unconventionally) applied at the filming stage as part of the figure’s environment. As the figure moves, some of the lines are attached to her body and move to her will. We are presented with drawing that was made before filming took place; drawing made during the filming, by the figure as she moved/moves; drawing on the surface of the Perspex and finally drawing on the walls- created by the shadows that result from the surface, in places, being transparent.
A selection of LCD screen works in the show are 'Odd things persist for inexplicable reasons', 'Fleshless Lovers' , 'Edifice', 'Construct in the mind of a sceptic', 'Chicken' and 'Tart of the day'.
