Staring at the Sun: Jack Brindley & Nick Jensen

Union Gallery is pleased to present Staring at the Sun, a joint exhibition between Jack Brindley and Nick Jensen. Taking its stance from the narrative of knowledge bases, and how ideas themselves have a trajectory and history. Conceived from discussions which leapt between Donald Rumsfelds’ ‘Known Knowns’ 2002 Iraq war speech, Ellsworth Kelley, Japanese Modernism, and T J Clarkes’ idiom of the window in Picassos’ ‘Three Dancers’ painting.

The exhibition brings into question how we perceive space and territories, via presence within absence. This came from Brindley and Jensen’s interest in wabi-sabi, a Japanese view on aesthetic, challenging the imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. They create a provisional space with various potentials on perspective.

The title of the exhibition, Staring at the Sun, confronts the act of gazing directly at the sun where we enter a visual and physical unease, stimulating the artists desire for a created haze within the presentation. Loose narratives occupy the works, giving portals into a dream-like melancholic state.


Brindley lives and works in Glasgow, UK

Jensen lives and works in London, UK

***

A text by Jack Brindley

Found dumb, Lucifer was once the brightest star. An opalescent miracle bleached out by the sun as it crashed down toward the horizon at dawn. A light-bearer fallen from a sky taut and black, converted to a bored architect spacing out known unknows. Stuttering blankly into the void, A sky so massive.

Distances and spaces extending away from themselves, and elegiac memories stretched to cover unencountered territories. Windows replaced with mirrors, whited out and impulses strained as fake histories are assembled.

Pure white Paintings straining perceptions, sculptures as pavilions, provisional spaces that try and hold onto an immaterial future, temporary sites of autonomy. mirrors and text artwork emerging from mist, like visions through a post-industrialist haze. Retrofitting poetry into bank statements, loose threads difficult to tie up. Artists like dumb poets, weaving materials with immaterial desires. A paradoxical situation a bit like Foucualts Heterotopias, a ‘no-place’ realised. Smithsons mirror displacement series photographed on Ebay.