C + N canepaneri, Milan
Gillian Brett
On the occasion of Art-O-Rama 2019, C + N Canepaneri gallery presents a solo show of the young French artist Gillian Brett (b.1990, Paris) in which a new works series, specifically realized for the Fair, will be exposed.
The practice of Gillian Brett is dedicated to analyse the delicate and complex relationship between the human being and technology, reflecting specifically on the ways and the processes by which it inevitably shapes and influences the surrounding world.
The project shows to the public a selection of thematically and formally connected key works in the artist’s research which aim to deepen further the technological characters of globalisation and its effects among the contemporary life.
Considering such issues, Brett’s installations are often unusual, absurd and poetic representations of technological and mechanical devices extrapolated from their context. Her works, often ironically imbued by a DIY aesthetic (Do It Yourself), appear to the spectator both as ruins of a future that has yet to come and as scars of an unfinished history.
The artists’ works, mainly realized by waste elements derived from technological and electronic devices, tells us how, although its apparently immaterial nature, the digital and technological disaster remains firmly bonded to the material reality. Through the artistic process of gathering and alteration of such debris, we immediately think about the toxic cities of the recycling system such as Guiyu in China, where motherboards are dismantled and hard disks poison the groundwater, or Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana, the widest electronic dump of Africa where European and American scraps end up.
Following to such a similar dismantling process but with opposite aims, Brett uses materials that she constantly manipulates: at the heart of her practice in fact always lays an authorial intervention by which, from time to time, she breaks, rips, scratches, welds and alters the composition elements until they are often reduced to a mere matter deprived of its previous utility.
