Since 1989, LYNDELL BROWN and CHARLES GREEN have worked in collaboration. Working within intersections of painting, photography and digital reproduction, the artists explore the complex notions of visual and cultural archival structures and the entwined connections between (artistic) memory and representation. Layering and fragmentation are particularly strong characteristics of Brown and Green’s works, not only through their trompe l’oeil methods of suspending disparate images atop another larger image, but also through the artists’ extraordinary technique of translating photographs into paintings, then translating them again through photographic transparencies. This method unites many modes of representation; Brown and Green are conscious of the tensions between documenting and representing, both being crucial to historical connections that they are making and that others have not seen before: ‘In these small theatres of suspended reality, hallucinations and dreams are not conditions of escape but urgent performative undertakings through which history, society and the self fleetingly come into focus’. Some of Brown and Green’s previous works have been closer to traditional landscape rather than their painted montages, however. A series of paintings that depict the 1960s Earth Artist Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, constructed in 1970 in the Great Salt Lake, Utah, and now visible above the waterline due to drought, reflect their deep engagement with Smithson’s theories of entropy and the ephemeral. Brown and Green’s Spiral Jetty series engages with their positive interaction with the archive, or cultural store, as opposed to the 1980s ‘mining’ or appropriation of other artist’s work. Indeed, this is a fundamental part of the artists’ practice – Brown and Green are rebuffing the 1980s prejudice against painting whilst beautifully and ironically representing Smithson’s work in a traditional format, without the disillusionment of postmodernism and retrieving the past for inspiration.
