Lauren Brincat: Shoot from the Hip

Overview

A mix of sculpture and video installation feature at Shoot from the Hip, Lauren Brincat’s first solo show at a private gallery. Southeasterlies to the Doldrums' full-size sail dominates the room, drooped from the ceiling to a low corner mounting. Fronds of magnetic cassette tape dangle from its underside, shaggy mushrooms under the sail's cavernous ceiling.

On opposite sides of the room, coloured pyramids Your Move and Golden Stranger are perplexing to the eye. Made from three triangular beams of wood with their pointed edge outward and the colour inside, each seems to disappear inwards like feet rolling on their arches. Doldrums, meanwhile, hosts a pair of cymbals facing each other expectantly, like speaker cones waiting for a fresh head to come between them.

Three pairs of video artworks sit along the far wall. Brincat has labelled each a “documentation of an action”, and in the exhibition’s accompanying essay, Tania Doropoulos describes their cyclical moments as having been “based in childhood memories.” Snare the Sea holds a drum by the lip of the sea, as surging waves roll in and bang it. In Dressing Down, a woman sits and stares into the middle distance. Behind her, someone slowly drags damp cotton whool over her eyes. Carciofo Arcimboldo films Brincat eating an artichoke, leaf by leaf, discarding its husks. She looks forward: pensive, concentrating. Wisps of Carravaggio seem to lurk in its folds and shadows, and the flattened profile suggests an oil painting.

Steady as She Goes, the show's poster image, has Brincat walk past us into the distance, between green grass and pre-Raphaelite mist. The mist and grass form a swirl across the diagonal, the whole scene moodily invoking a lone moment in the country. For all of these video works, the narrow depth of field combined with the high resolution make them seem like flowing moments of painting, or still photography.