#michaelbrennan

Mother’s Day Magic.  

Michael Brennan

SUSPENDED ANIMATION

The materiality of the medium has always played a large part in Michael Brennan’s practice. Anyone familiar with his creative output over the years from 2003 till now will have picked up on the manner in which he lets the process of whichever medium he is working with guide his work. This is most evident in his depictions of the natural environment and man’s interaction with them.  There is an uneasy balance between the human presence and the natural world. Between the process of paint drying at differing rates, creating organic motifs and rippled chaotic surfaces, and the clean clear formalist lines of the draftsman. Which is overpowering the other or do these opposing forces hold each other, contain each other? Very often there is the human figure, Brennan himself, moving through these vast spaces and urban edifices, finding his way, our way, to relate to the scale and the inevitability of decay and change. 

Suspended Animation is his latest creation in a series of works that appear to actively ameliorate these opposing forces of control and entropic decay. There is also a coming to terms with the need for movement between what might appear to be opposites. The spaces between polarized points of view or the movement between the architectural and the organic fascinate Brennan. How we deal with these liminal aspects of lived reality has become an ongoing concern and motivation for blurring the lines between painting and installation.

Suspended Animation, a bridge made by hand from old fence palings pulled from the family fence presents us with a painter’s awareness of the graduations of colour within the sculptural form. Nothing, from the painter’s point of view is just black and white, but particular variations with particular qualities. The subtle shifts between tones becomes a metaphor for the way awareness and understanding also shift and change dependent on points of view. Through the physical encounter with the installation Brennan asks us to consider “the narrowness of a given perspective” Look down the length of the installation at the crumbling remains of a boundary that once contained a family’s perimeter and we become aware that our place in time and in space are permeable transient moments. What was once a solid, defensible  delineation is softly fading away.

Deb Bain-King