The pram in the hallway at MEANWHILE is about the artists’ relationship: as mother, Frances, and daughter, Kata. The exhibition uses collaboration to explore the relationship and interaction between them: the tensions, inherited ambitions, changing interpersonal power and thwarted dreams.
In this exhibition, collaboration becomes a vessel for deeper exploration. The creative exchange between Krsinich and Brown unravels the narratives of their shared experience, sifting through layers of understanding, conflict, and love. The merging of their individual artistic voices gives rise to a conversation between them, delving into the unspoken truths that exist within the spaces they inhabit both together and separately. The artists have created a series of large and small paintings, some individually and some together.
Brown paints from photographs of the artists as young mother and child. These works delve into the realm of memories, captured by Krsinich at the time. They portray a deeply profound and potentially uncomfortable aspect of the mother-daughter relationship – clinging and dependant, yet lost to Brown’s memory.
For Krsinich, this time was creatively fertile but also thwarted, with the time-demands and mind-occupyingness of motherhood both inspiring and crowding out explicit art-making. Krsinich’s paintings are preoccupied with work (income-making and art-making) and time, and the constant re-evaluation of how to make it all fit.
Together, Brown and Krsinich meld their work to provide a new viewpoint on the challenges and opportunities of parenthood from the perspectives of both child and parent. The ‘note’ paintings find their inspiration in the scribbled messages sent by Brown to Krsinich, preserved in a folder over the course of many years. These artworks symbolize the dynamic between a daughter and her mother. One note emerges from a tantrum, filled with juvenile animosity and a belief in its everlasting grip. The other note reveals a desperate, childish yearning for validation, affection, and acceptance.
The video was a collaboration with James Tweedle, and is an exploration of vulnerability and the symbolic power of foretelling the moment of conception. The video narrates Krsinich’s dream on what she believes was the night of Brown’s conception, while Brown shaves Krsinich’s head as a reclaiming of power and agency, alongside a symbolic freeing from the role of ‘mother’.
Comments