Sweat
Solo exhibition at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London
16/1/14 - 15/2/14
PV 15/1/14 6-8pm
Incorporating sweat, recycled paper and purchased images within his work, Brindley explores the interrelation between excess and the workplace by salvaging, and subsequently repurposing, the by-products of everyday labour. In particular, Brindley is interested in how our understanding of ‘work’ has changed. No longer being measured in terms of its physical demands on the body, contemporary labour has evolved to encompass immaterial modes of work, such as data crunching and telecommunication. Within the gallery space, Brindley highlights the presence of these invisible ‘actions’ by salvaging residual, material waste from the workplace and incorporating it into his work. Brindley stages this exploration of excess alongside structures of display; steel partitions are used in an attempt to 'choreograph space,' similar to the manner in which offices are split up into distinct zones with room dividers.
Deploying dehumidifiers in a number of architectural practices across London, Brindley has harvested the water collected from the units to produce a series of monochromatic watercolours with ink cartridges taken from commercial printers. Here, the artist looks at the significance of sweat as a concomitant of labour, exacerbating its presence by rendering the paintings in vibrant tones of red, blue and yellow. This fascination with abject fluids continues in a series of stock photographs which depict the saturated armpits of office workers. Purchased from an online database, the artist queries the relationship between the commercial and intellectual copyright of these images. Sold to be used in any number of ways, Brindley is interested in how the commercial photographer is 'working for the image' and it is their purchase that assigns them with a significance in the world.
Brindley has also produced a series of pulped, paper works consisting of disused press releases from previous exhibitions at the gallery. Here, the artist shifts his focus from the office to the gallery as a site of labour. Brindley explains that ‘producing paper from recycled press releases, documents and fragments from the gallery is a way of folding in the narrative of the space into the work itself. Although it is my intention that these works talk about a form of excess, there is a bigger question about the mechanisms of production used in galleries that I want to think about. In a sense, the work becomes entwined with the infrastructures that facilitated and supported previous shows at the gallery.’