Anneké Pettican

Biography

Anneké Pettican is an artist and co-director of Brass Art (1999 -) with Chara Lewis and Kristin Mojsiewicz. Their collaborative practice explores the uncanny, including aspects of doubling and the limen – the inbetween spaces of the physical world and the realms of the imagination. Brass Art’s recent exhibitions include Flights of Fancy, Tatton Park Biennial (2012) curated by Danielle Arnaud and Jordan Kaplan; Dark Matters: Shadow Technology Art, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (2011) curated by Helen Stalker; The Economy of the Gift, A Foundation, Liverpool (2011) curated by Ticiana Correa; Inside Out, Object Gallery, Sydney and touring; Concrete and Glass, Hoxton Square, London (2011) curated by Flora Fairbairn and Paul Hitchman. Brass Art regularly present their research and practice at international conferences, and in published peer-reviewed journals and books. In 2012 they presented new research on 3D and 4D scanning in relation to the creation of shadow worlds at Siggraph 2012, Los Angeles, and their paper was published in a special edition of Leonardo (MIT Press). They further developed aspects of this practice as artists in residence at Creative Lab, Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Glasgow, 2012. Additionally Brass Art collaborate with other practitioners, researchers and industries. Recent artistic collaborators include Professor Monty Adkins, Simon Patterson, Alison Mealey and Spencer Roberts. Pettican and Roberts installations have been shown at international festivals including the International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA) and Bank Art, Yokahama, Japan as part of the 2008 Biennial.

Research Interest

Brass Art employ traditional analogue and contemporary digital media, using and misusing them in search of the uncanny, to create artworks in which the artists are both present, and at the same time absent. Brass Art capture themselves in real and imagined situations. They have occupied museum collections, been passengers in hot air balloon flights and acted as trespassers. In 2008 Anneké Pettican received an Arts & Humanities Research Council Practice-led and Applied award, that enabled Brass Art to research white light laser technology in order to scan themselves faithfully. The resulting portraits were staged, performed, digitised, modelled and printed in 3D to create ‘uncanny doubles’ which can be seen in a series of light based installations and sculptural interventions. This initial work resulted in Brass Art more recently researching and developing the potential for 4D facial scanning working with both Glasgow University and UCLAN. Brass Art have recently initiated a new project titled Shadow Worlds | Writers’ Rooms. Beginning at the Brontë Parsonage Museum (2011), Brass Art captured the masking and unmasking of themselves and imagined alter egos within the domestic spaces. The project used both digital photography and custom built software, combined with Microsoft’s Kinect, to produce strikingly different versions of each scene. The installation of the work will be premiered at Huddersfield Art Gallery (2013) and will include a new sound commission produced in collaboration with a contemporary electroacoustic composer.