we move, just shifting
Centre Clark, Montreal, Québec
January 15 - February 12, 2022
Text by Lucas Regazzi
The show’s namesake is a pair of photographs depicting a drinking glass—smeared in yogurt—beyond blurry fingers and toes. As when a snapshot clips its maker’s thumb, the subject appears distant, found, outside deliberation.
A closer read turns depth of field into a poetic shorthand for touch. Foreground presses against the objects of the middle-ground in a purely visual field. A clue of broader intervention emerges.
The yogurt maps caressing gestures and the hand holds the lens like a lover. This is the notion of connection that makes Brookbank’s visual language, between people, self, and objects in photography. The mark of touch urges the significance of its landed-upon surface, and through it imparts an affective charge. No strict narrative is clear but the decadence of privacy in poetry, and photography’s absolute surrealist tendencies. A vague network of symbols—twigs, figurines, skin, fruit, jewellery—pry sealed histories ajar.
There is an impulse to leave the image and reproduce its world in the flesh. Objects placed within some photographs come alive and writhe as sculpture: atop a supine print of the sun wiggles yarn, bag ties and a wishbone. Something similar takes place on a print of knuckles. A column of tensely twisted t-shirts, collected from actors in Brookbank’s life, assemble to the status of architecture, while remaining vulnerable to stains.
In one photograph, two brown socks perch on the perimeter of a circular glass pane. The socks lend to a reading of the glass as a body proxy; some phantom stained reddish. Might this signal ouch or blush as coy soles dodge an errant fruit? The stain—clear metaphor for feeling—writes the body’s inventory.
we move, just shifting maps the brushing sensation of celestial transits, tectonic shifts and collective change at the scale of an inner world. Form, like feeling, is the catalyst of confluent forces that mark us as we mark them.
