Looking at Louisa Chambers’ work put me in mind of Bruno Munari and his useless machines, not to be confused with his comic machines seen in Einaudi’s Le Macchine di Munari, “projects for strange constructions for wagging the tails of lazy dogs, for predicting the dawn, for making sobs sound musical, and many other facetious things of that kind”.
The artist describes her work: “Inventing fantastical objects and constructions are the starting points of my recent practice. These spaces and objects symbolize personal narratives; they are aesthetically playful but have an underlining dark humour. I primarily use memory but also appropriate from source materials that reference architecture, popular culture, scientific technology, folklore and mysticism. From these sources and through the mediums of paint and drawing, shapes transform into anthropomorphizing inanimate objects or machines. Sometimes they are clunky and fragile never able to function and teetering on the verge of collapse.”
I was wondering why they are so compelling, and I came across Steven Connor’s Thinking Things, which might shed some light on why.
“As Bill Brown observes, one characteristic of thing theory is precisely that it focuses on things rather than objects. For Brown, objects are what we know, objects are things that know their place, and whose place we know. Things arise when objects down tools and refuse to cooperate with us, break down, or have their functions mysteriously interrupted. ‘We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily’ (Brown 2001, 4). Things come into visibility when the thought of them ruptures or ebbs.”