PRESSURE installation
Large Scale Installation at the Pump Project Art Complex in East Austin
Jan 21- Feb 15, 2012
This project was funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign. Thank you to all my backers!
We experience pressure acutely. It manifests as a physical, temporal, social, or ideological force. It can lead to utter stagnation or generate the urgency to act. Brooke Gassiot focuses on the more optimistic of these effects, in which pressure stimulates the drive to move, to change, and to create. Here, pressure is a generative force.
In her first large-scale installation, “Pressure,” Gassiot explores the idea symbolically. A constructed, billowing cloud of steam surges upward to the ceiling, pouring unexpectedly from a vintage console television. On the screen cycles a video loop of a tea kettle gradually heating and steaming. Instead of the tea kettle’s piercing whistle, however, we hear the din of voices, specifically, reporters’ voices, rising and falling in tandem with the kettle’s release. The media theme continues in the steam, which is a papier-mâché sculpture crafted from strips of newspaper. Here is the social and ideological pressure, those outside messages that come together as so much noise. Elsewhere in the space is heard a steady drip-drip-drip, which emanates from a contained projection of just that: dripping water.
“Pressure” is an expansion of Gassiot’s work in light boxes. Each of her light boxes is a singular environment, lit from within by its own, obscured light source. The boxes stimulate in the viewer the desire to access their multi-layered recesses. The lighting is such that it highlights the tactile qualities of fur, fabric, and other mixed media, but that accessibility is an illusion. It is sensation abstracted: viewed, imagined, but ultimately undelivered and undeliverable. Each time, the viewer is barred by the physical limits of the box and by the glass membrane that separates this world from that.
Though “Pressure” finally grants the viewer access to an environment, it is not without denial. Projecting into the installation space is a dimensional portal. Constructed of acrylic glass, the portal is an elongated box through which we might glimpse an unattainable space on the other side of a solid wall. Through this window is visible a moist and leafy environment. Its foliage is dark, like the forest floor beneath a thick canopy. There is a pervasive sense of wetness in this verdant space. Surely, the air would be humid and earthy. By contrast, the water elsewhere in the installation is water that neither quenches nor sustains. It only steams or drips. Yet, beyond this window is a fertile space. It might be the ideal growth that pressure yields, if only we could reach it.
writing by Kimberly Dolan
Jan 21- Feb 15, 2012
This project was funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign. Thank you to all my backers!
We experience pressure acutely. It manifests as a physical, temporal, social, or ideological force. It can lead to utter stagnation or generate the urgency to act. Brooke Gassiot focuses on the more optimistic of these effects, in which pressure stimulates the drive to move, to change, and to create. Here, pressure is a generative force.
In her first large-scale installation, “Pressure,” Gassiot explores the idea symbolically. A constructed, billowing cloud of steam surges upward to the ceiling, pouring unexpectedly from a vintage console television. On the screen cycles a video loop of a tea kettle gradually heating and steaming. Instead of the tea kettle’s piercing whistle, however, we hear the din of voices, specifically, reporters’ voices, rising and falling in tandem with the kettle’s release. The media theme continues in the steam, which is a papier-mâché sculpture crafted from strips of newspaper. Here is the social and ideological pressure, those outside messages that come together as so much noise. Elsewhere in the space is heard a steady drip-drip-drip, which emanates from a contained projection of just that: dripping water.
“Pressure” is an expansion of Gassiot’s work in light boxes. Each of her light boxes is a singular environment, lit from within by its own, obscured light source. The boxes stimulate in the viewer the desire to access their multi-layered recesses. The lighting is such that it highlights the tactile qualities of fur, fabric, and other mixed media, but that accessibility is an illusion. It is sensation abstracted: viewed, imagined, but ultimately undelivered and undeliverable. Each time, the viewer is barred by the physical limits of the box and by the glass membrane that separates this world from that.
Though “Pressure” finally grants the viewer access to an environment, it is not without denial. Projecting into the installation space is a dimensional portal. Constructed of acrylic glass, the portal is an elongated box through which we might glimpse an unattainable space on the other side of a solid wall. Through this window is visible a moist and leafy environment. Its foliage is dark, like the forest floor beneath a thick canopy. There is a pervasive sense of wetness in this verdant space. Surely, the air would be humid and earthy. By contrast, the water elsewhere in the installation is water that neither quenches nor sustains. It only steams or drips. Yet, beyond this window is a fertile space. It might be the ideal growth that pressure yields, if only we could reach it.
writing by Kimberly Dolan
