pat brassington

Interview with Julianna Engberg Artistic Director of ACCA. About Pat Brassington work– transcript of interview

Jacqui – We are outside a photo of a dog with a kind of a moon structure. So what’s this kind of about?

Julianna – I think Pat is ripping off surrealism here. I’m also drawn into thinking the cow jumps over the moon. You’ve noticed instantly that’s it’s a dog but a lot of people think it’s a cow because that’s the kind of association  you make in your head with the fairytale the Chaucer story and I popped it here I’ve put it high . It’s almost a frivolous image what is a kind of darker subject matter that Pat has.

Its an entry point , it might show a lot of humour ,dark humour that goes around in the works and also it is here to encourage people to slow down a bit and become more observational, don’t imagine that  what you see is what you get. Don’t imagine that it’s a cow look at it very carefully and notice that’s its actually just a benign domestic dog probably having a snooze on the carpet and what she has put  it next to its not a moon obviously its some kind of texture it might be a rock or something. But the conjunction of these two things produces an uncanny unusual almost fun kind of image it’s a bit deceitful because the show gets a bit more gloomy as we get on.

Jacqui – Ok lets go to some more gloom. This reminds me of the Un Chien Andalou – An Andalusian dog.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCl_8522FF0

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Julianna – Yes your quite right your referring to Luis Bunuel and Salvidor Dali. And that’s precisely the direction I would head in if I was looking at this work. This work is from the mid 80’s when Pat Brassington was interested in decoded visual language. I call this a surrealist visual linguistic piece because what we see here is a grid a group of borrowed images or appropriated images that can be decoded down through a somewhat semiotic signage to derive a kind of language – the female genitalia we see at the top there are upturned hats on men looking up into the sky a reference obviously to Man Rays hat image with the clef in the middle which is sort of a vulvic symbolism if you want . underneath that obviously a fish a kind of slang kind of visual connotations of genitalia.

The hysterical women image much of which comes from medical research in the late 19^th century.  They weren’t of course they were probably people who had terrible menstrual cycles or something like that you know infact who were downright frustrated You read this image very much as a set of signs and figures that lead you to something and we see a glass shattered it starts to get quite irksome . If we think the glass as being some kind of membrane  this is a sign perhaps of some kind of violation.

So perhaps we are looking here at some kind of horrible incident that includes an abuse or mis abuse of women or there sexuality perhaps intervention perhaps abuse of somesort or violation and here we have the complication of some kind of evangelical symbolism so we could work out from this image that it has something to do with priests etc. on the outside of the system of grids we have the lone female looking in at the scene. And for me this is quite an interesting twist on the normal male voyeurism . Its an image we both possibly know recognize. Its Marion Crane from Psycho   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gzhNRfZyHQ

So in a sense its turning the tables on the Psycho idea of the male looking at the female now it’s a female looking back at this complex story. But to me maybe its  a complicated gaze looking upon something that you know is unspeakable its problematic it’s a  problem to be solved its still a little bit obscure or outside their grasp

Jacqui – What is this series about it seems isolated and disconnected

Julianna – These works were done in Cambridge road like the earlier works we were discussing, this is our Pat working in a more digital kind of territory so she is actually building images now and I think this is one of those interesting things about Pat in this exhibition we begin to see how she evolves not only in her photo based language but she is also  moving from the analogue to the digital and of course its much harder to make mistakes in digital you have to put the mistake in  a kind of fashion. 

What we see here in Cambridge road is a kind of measured kind of narrative we see  Pat deliberately  building images to include things you may have once found in an incident of analogue. So in an instance this image here we are looking at  is something which is clearly domestic we think it’s a bedroom its got a kind of dressing table its got a chair but its also got a fantasmic flash which is like an apparition.

Now in surrealist photography famously Lee Miller  http://www.leemiller.co.uk/Default.aspx

     one of the people who discovered solarisation. If you exposed your negative or you exposed the process of printing in an unexpected kind of way you often get a mistake of some sorts bringing uncanny incidents into the picture with digital you cant do that. You’ve got to put it in quite deliberately. So I think Pat is trying to evolve the digital language to become much more malleable much more pliable much more like analogue and what then she has produced tin these scenes is a system of images that are wearing masks strange people coming in doorways forlorn and gloomy abandoned kind of spaces places that have an irksome kind of felling to rooms you see through doorways a kind of startled dog who looks as if he is worried about someone and curious abandoned places which become sinister. That is what Cambridge road is about but it is open to interpretation..

This interview has been edited