Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne
Beneath the Surface, Behind the Scenes
Backstage 2022, ongoing
Drop cloths, brass eyelets, rope, steel rod, dimension variable.
Lauren Brincat’s site-specific installation Backstage 2022, ongoing is a large composition of hanging artifacts that breathe, turning the space into a choreographed walkable installation. This curtain is made up of many drop sheets covered in marks. Previously used by artists, installers, and workers to create artworks or prepare exhibitions, Brincat has reclaimed these materials from the out of sight, back-of-house areas from institutions, galleries and museums. These clothes have been collected over time tracing the emotional labour of artmaking. Each cloth retains vestiges of past moments of making and the labour and imagination involved in the production of art and constructing exhibitions.
Brincat arranges her drop sheets architecturally to build navigable spaces for viewers to interact with, creating backstage environments and spaces for contemplation. Here, the configurations of draped fabrics, variously folded, flowing and hanging, suggest temporal choreographies in space and across time and gatherings of creative energies, materials and gestures. Backstage offers an invitation to be both audience and performer, to think about how we mentally prepare for and rehearse social encounters, and the on and off-stage moments that make-up everyday experience as well as the traces that we leave behind.
images by Kristoffer Paulsen