TOUCH STONE
KIRSTEN BREHMER AND DIONNE LEE
TOUCH STONE. Video Collaboration. 2018.
Touch Stone, an exhibition by Kirsten Brehmer and Dionne Lee at CTRL+SHFT Collective. Through photography and video, Brehmer and Lee explore their own relationships to land and nature, and how such spaces can shape one’s understanding of their place in the wider world.
Touch Stone is an exhibition investigating how we understand our participation, position, scale, and effect in our environments. In the piece Site Lines two figures work together to draw lines from one point to another, fastening it underneath rocks that form a labyrinth. The shape drawn emerges further as a cloud passes over, highlighting points of exchange and revealing a new networks of paths.
The works in Touch Stone explore varying experiences of recognizing one’s scale to their surroundings while considering markers of place, everything from the gap between two trees to the eclipse of your shadow passing over a patch of poppies on your walk home.
Installation Images. CTRL+SHFT Collective. 2019.
Of Significant Width. 2018.
ENTRY POINT
[READING ROOM]
Accompanying the exhibition is a reading and research room, offering a casual space during gallery hours for conversation and engagement with resources meant to serve as an entry point for deepening one’s relationship to the natural world. The reading room features text selections and work by invited artists: Alex Arzt, Angela Berry, and Nkiruka Oparah, whose works engage the natural world in relation to the self.
Oparah’s sound piece, land and landlessnes, blends familiar sounds of nature, such as a trickling stream to urban neighborhood sounds, bringing the two worlds together and redefining our understanding of what nature may sound like.
Artz’s botanical videos investigates what “getting back to nature” can mean in the age of man-made ecological crises and asks how we can look at the nonhuman things around us anew by rethinking attributions of agency and subjectivity and by utilizing an imaginative empathy.
Berry’s solarized silver gelatin prints, Bloodsport, capture the reclaiming of wild spaces as animals notice, and then attack, a nearby drone surveilling their movements.
Oracle (Pulse). Video Collaboration. 2019.