Laura Bruce

Floating ip is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Berlin-based artist Laura Bruce. Working in video, multiple screen installation, sculpture, painting and coloured pencil drawing, Bruce has had solo exhibitions in London, New York, Berlin and Dresden, most recently at Büro für Kunst, Dresden and Eyewash at the Girdle Factory, New York.

For floating ip Bruce will be showing a small family of three works, two of which are video pieces in which the artist wears a wig and takes on a character whose world is anchored to the everyday. New Day (2003) is a ten minute monologue in which the character charts her day in mundane detail, unswervingly engrossed by the decisions and judgements that structure her domestic life. Choosing between taking a shower or cleaning the apartment is at once a trivial interruption in her daily routine and a gap through which we can witness the workings of an entire universe. When explaining why she asks a waitress to remake her café au lait - because the enjoyment of a coffee is diminished when its cold and you have to drink it faster - you get a glimpse of a world that is ordered, measured and managed for a thin version of pleasure. She speaks of gaining satisfaction, and she uses the exact same tone whether she is counting off the phone calls she needs to make or mopping the floor. As Harald Kunde has written about Bruce's work: the thin layer of the banal is exactly and precisely perforated by poetic thought, revealing a hidden abundance of narrative, drama and irony.

I Love Paris (2003) combines the same stoical pieces to camera with a soundtrack in which the artist puts her heart into the eponymous song with an emotional charge that is as affective as it is incongruous. The powerful and soulful singing voice, heard over the image of the woman's blank, tired face, seems to come from nowhere or from somewhere hidden, off-camera and off-limits. Such hints of depth and vivacity sit uneasily with passages in which the character describes her understanding of the social benefits of the coffee table: I bought a cozy little coffee table. I think it's quite fundamental to human nature to want to sit around things…It gives us a focus. Otherwise either alone or with company, you'd be sitting in the middle of the floor really. You might sit in a circle, but it's quite funny to have nothing in the circle. Bruce's utilisation of extra-diegetic elements, non-synchronous editing and non-chronological sequence in I Love Paris unravels the character, spilling gems onto the surface of her everyday life.

The third piece exhibited at floating ip is Laundrywide (2003), a landscape constructed out of second hand clothes folded and piled up on a shelf on the wall of the gallery. Differences in medium and technique, especially the piece's lack of dialogue, separates this work from the two videos, but the persistence of the themes of the videos becomes increasingly apparent on closer examination. Arranging the clothes into a landscape is a small act of transformation, of a certain kind of longing, that ultimately never manages fully to transcend the banality of the material used to represent the wide open space of an imagined land. Infinity, freedom and nature are conjured up within the very narrow confines of a pile of newly laundered shirts, pullovers, bathrobes, T-shirts, coats and jackets. This is a physically slender facsimile of unlimited space that is, at the same time, a distillation of extravagant hopes into the channels of domestic work. This is not a cynical or depressing outcome. Despite the limits of the repetitive and routine acts of washing, folding and piling, the landscape lifts the spirits like a gorgeous voice singing from the heart.

Laura Bruce
DOMESTIC BLUR