Installation
Umbra Penumbra Antumbra
2 channel video with surround sound, multi media sculpture, approx. 20m x10m x 5m.
Exhibited in the 17th Biennale of Sydney 2010 ‘Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age’ curated by David Elliot, Founding Director, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, 2001-2006
Excerpt from a review in Art Practical magazine by Laura Cassidy-
"Equally intriguing was the video installation Umbra: Penumbra: Antumbra (2010), by the Australian artist Brodie Ellis. I reluctantly stepped through a large rain puddle at the entrance into the ominous, pitch-black space of the installation, and was pleasantly surprised when my eyes adjusted to the encompassing darkness. For Ellis, light and sculpture are significant accoutrements to her video work. For this installation, she elongated the exhibition chamber by placing two elliptical frames on the floor in the foreground and middle ground, and placing a third frame on the wall in the background. She created the first and last frames using the light of video projections, while she fabricated the middle frame by welding thick steel rods to create a heavy conical sculpture that anchored the optical experience. Resting on its side and illuminated by an overhead spotlight, Ellis’s sculpture mimicked the anatomy of an eye, referencing the mechanics of vision and depth of perception.
The fourth elliptical layer of this installation was the subject of the video itself, a solar eclipse that she captured on July 22, 2009, in Japan’s Yakusugi Forest. The morphing imagery displayed on two channels—on the ground immediately at my feet and on the wall in the distance—explored the core aesthetics of perception: horizon lines, color intensity, and soft- versus hard-edged shapes. Umbra: Penumbra: Antumbra was deeply affective and impressionistic, and in its entirety, a personal favorite of mine on Cockatoo Island."
Exhibition documentation: Silversalt Photography
Noosphere
Single channel video with surround sound, mixed media sculpture, approx. 8m x 10m x 4m.
Exhibited in New 09 at ACCA, 2009. Curated by Charlotte Day.
Excerpt from the exhibition catalogue essay-
FROM EARTH TO SKY AND BEYOND: THE LONG DRIVE HOME
By ULANDA BLAIR
Noosphere, 2009, shot on location in Burketown, a tiny remote township that clings languidly to the lowest point of the Gulf of Carpentaria in Queensland’s far north, depicts the rare Morning Glory cloud, an atmospheric oddity that occurs annually in the changeover from the dry to the wet season. Known in meteorological circles as a ‘solition’ – a solitary cloud with a single crest that moves at a constant pace without changing form – the Morning Glory is a low-lying torrent of cloud that can stretch up to 1,000 kilometres long. For a few weeks every year, a band of hopeful and intrepid hang-glider pilots descend on the isolated township, eager to experience one of nature’s most graceful and enigmatic forces. When the sporadic and unpredictable Morning Glory materialises, the gliders soar skyward, catching the unfurling wave and ‘surfing’ the cloud as it rolls westward across the Gulf.
The hypnotic video footage that appears in Ellis’s Noosphere was captured on one of these Icarus-like voyages. The work’s title references the scientific and philosophical idea that the evolution of human consciousness is constantly reconfiguring the earth’s biosphere, for better or for worse. Deleuze adopts the term ‘noosphere’ when describing “an image [of the world] which goes beyond itself towards something which can only be thought.” Ellis’s video thus directs our gaze beyond the seductive image of the Morning Glory cloud, into a sublime, metaphysical realm. Like “The Zone” in Andrei Tarkovsky’s seminal 1979 science fiction film Stalker, Noosphere’s cloudscape is a place where logic, science and rules have fleeting hold; it is an unstable space activated by individual and collective ideas and experiences.
Entering the darkened exhibition space, the viewer cannot help but feel dwarfed and disoriented by the tightly framed expanse of lava-like cloud that is projected overhead: colours shift, time seeps and one’s perspective becomes distorted. The billowing Morning Glory mutates and bends, forming Baroque-like folds and torsions that look both solid and pouring. Assuming the glider’s own aerial perspective, the viewer becomes mesmerised by the inexhaustible vigour and titanic features of the cloudscape bearing down from above. The rhythmic soundtrack of a pounding heartbeat overlaid with intermittent sonar beeps, heightens this ontological instability and casts the viewer further adrift.
Noosphere, like Ellis’s previous works, is imbued with existential gravitas. The Romantic Sublime, and particularly the Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich, is clearly a reference or point of departure for any consideration of her work, which is not to say that Ellis is a latter-day Romantic. For one thing, she seems to rule out the consolatory appeal to divine omniscience, and omnipotence, which was central to Friedrich’s vision. Instead, Ellis’s installations convey dramatic narratives of exploration and human progress that are often tempered by complex dystopian undercurrents. Her art questions how we can know and reach our fullest potential within the constraints of a fragile planet.
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The magnificent jewelled sculpture that stretches mid-air across the Noosphere installation invites further allegorical interpretation. Adapted from a century-old horse-harness, Ellis transforms this once-functional apparatus into a formal sculptural object that belies its antiquated and humble beginnings. Gleaming in the darkness like a high-tech satellite, the sculpture floats across time and space, echoing the Morning Glory glider-planes that harness the atmosphere’s rising air currents. Symbolising humanity’s sustained and ongoing alteration of its natural environment, and combining materials and techniques from across different historical eras, Ellis’s sculpture is a complex signifier of temporal and spatial concrescence.
Noosphere offers up a poetic and compelling meditation on nature, and the construction of a language of nature. Continuing Ellis’ long held investigations into the relationship between exploration, technological advancement and environmental sustainability, Noosphere also signals a departure, taking its audience into increasingly abstract and subterranean realms. As spectators, we are not only caught between the gaps and fissures breaking up the illusion of linear time, but also in the predicament of being unable to discern between what is real and what is imagined. Taking the Morning Glory as her inspiration, Ellis creates a boundless, dreamlike space; a space of metamorphosis and transcendence.
Exhibition documentation: Christian Capurro
The Superpit
Single channel video with stereo sound, mixed media sculptures, approx. 8m x 8m x 3m.
Exhibited at Conical and commissioned by Next Wave, 2008. Curated by Jeff Kahn & Ulanda Blair.
Excerpt from the catalogue essay by Helen Johnson-
“The Super Pit’s sinister qualities take the fore in Brodie Ellis’ installation of the same name. Ellis takes the mine, the people and the environment which co-exist in the fantasies of KCGM’s PR executives and posits a space where the reality of their interrelatedness is freed from corporate agenda, and some of the ghosts and monsters which the Super Pit at once hosts and denies are released.
Ellis has reproduced a set of objects from the mine which function as ideas, records of force. A massive, blown-out tyre and a disused excavator bucket, purposive artefacts which are situated at the public entry point to the Super Pit, have been translated into a brittle, provisional material state. Pine armatures support cardboard, fabric, clay and craft glue, all materials which are ultimately destined to give way. The cardboard and pine suck moisture from the clay, causing it to crack. It is an approach of enforced vulnerability, not merely imposed upon each object but inserted into its core, allowing for failure to remain on its own terms – indeed gunning for failure. Objects which were formerly defined solely by the mine’s driving pragmatism, and once rendered useless were allowed to remain for their spectacular physical presence, are decontextualised and in turn somehow humanised. This aspect of Ellis’ work is like a ritual, an alchemical exercise; an invocation of half dead apparatuses and their relationship to the doomed, but still pulsing, mine.
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Ellis’ reconfiguration of objects and entities into inherently impermanent formal meditations, often made from painstakingly gathered materials, transfigures them into something fragile and revealing. The work is like a shadow of a shadow in this regard, akin to those anxiety dreams where you find your teeth are the consistency of chalk and they begin to crumble when you bite down. Her particular brand of mimesis parallels homeopathic magic”
Exhibition documentation: Christian Capurro
SpaceshipOne
“SpaceshipOne” was installed at Gertrude Contemporary in 2008. Wrested and wrangled together from clay, paper, hessian & pine so that it slowly and deliberately degraded over the course of the exhibition. A vessel which replicates the winner of the Ansari X Prize as the first commercially viable space flight vehicle (sponsored by Richard Branson), can also be viewed as being tethered to the collective cultural fantasy of escaping from the planet that sustains us. On another level it reminded me of the Colditz Glider made by British soldiers and airmen held prisoner by the Germans in Colditz castle WW2. They built their escape vessel/glider out of bedsheets and porridge using a bathtub as a counterweight for lift off. The project sustained them through the horrors of their incarceration although the war ended before they could fly to safety.