Category: Art
In their latest collaboration Anna Burns and Thomas Brown have dived into high machismo world of B-Movie staples; guns, girls and explosives but with a very British twist. What could be more British than mixing these iconic b-movie tools with a giant wall of umbrellas and locating them in three stereotypical British landscapes; the forest, London’s docklands and the grounds of a Suffolk Manor house. The project is a multi-media presentation of film, photography and chandeliers produced over the past year.
Here Anna Burns describes how it all came together:
'This is really just self indulgent image making, pure and simple! I always find it's a good way to let off steam and do some work that is totally off the commission conveyor belt. A few years ago it was a book with Michael Baumgarten called the Deformers and now it's a project I have been working on for about 18 months with Tom Brown. It started as a purely stills project but the idea really lent itself to films and also to installation; hence it grew and began to take more and more time to produce.
The basic premise was to build installations of printed umbrellas that when opened up create one huge image. The idea was to create big boisterous tongue-in-cheek images in very British settings: An AK47 on a graffitied background shot in a Norfolk forest, a 70's porn image found in a magazine I bought at a car boot sale that was set in an old factory and finally a giant 80's explosion featuring a Mustang in front of a manor house in Suffolk.
The films play on the silliness of the installations, helped along with a soundtrack by MEAN RED who are a fantastic sound design duo that brought another level to the motion, adding a little 'climax' to each scenario – a puff of coloured smoke from the AK, some pigeons flying from the nether regions of the porn model and a giant real explosion burning the printed explosion.
The show features three films, a selection of prints showing the outdoor installations and some carefully lit still lives of select umbrellas. In the space there are also three giant upturned umbrellas which have been made into chandeliers printed with collages designed from the original artwork.' Amazing.