Moving a seam ripper into a Boring Billion

Opening, Friday, October 2nd, 5 - 8 pm.

The exhibition ‘Moving a seam ripper into the Boring Billion’ brings together works from the series ‘binders’ and ‘bellows’. The works focus on components that bend and flex to fit around more rigid parts. Together the works explore animals, phenomena and systems that are often overlooked. These range from microscopic animals that adapt to their surroundings as a way to survive, to the long period of time known as the ‘Boring Billion’. This was a period in Earth’s history filled with large masses of microbes that formed multi-layered microbial mats.

Brigitte Louter (°1996, NL) is a visual artist based in Amsterdam working across installation, sculpture, and drawing. Her practice is rooted in a fascination for human attempts to order and clarify a world that continually escapes rigid categorization. She often uses visual elements and solutions from educational contexts, data visualization and measuring instruments. With an attention for (im)practicality, (im)possibility and (in)visibility, she hopes to create works with their own offbeat logic.

Louter studied at the Royal Academy of Art The Hague and was a participant at De Ateliers Amsterdam. She was a resident at WIELS Brussels, EKWC Oisterwijk and Villa Arson in Nice. Her work has been shown at P////AKT Amsterdam, Stroom Den Haag and Amsterdam Museum, among others. In 2022 she set the world record for the ‘Largest folding measuring ruler’.

Some words by Brigitte about the works in the exhibition. 

In the works ‘Filter Feeder’s Flashback’ and ‘Kiln Binder’ the logic of commonplace ring binders is subverted. Perforations follow the specific pencil drawn content, and the metal loops are then shaped to pierce through and accommodate only this paper. Opening larger questions about relationships between system and component, or carrier and content.

In ‘Daphnia Bellows’ and ‘Fruit Fly Bellows’ spaces are opened for two animals that are rarely considered outside of their possible use or nuisance for humans. The Daphnia, a small crustacean commonly called water flea, and the fruit fly, or Drosophila. The flexible objects are informed by the form and function of industrial folding bellows that protect moving machine parts. Images about the size of a human fingernail are incorporated into the layers of the works, most of them hardly visible.

In ‘Fruit Fly Bellows’  the images, as viewed from the ‘posterior end’ of the object, show all the different shapes of existing fruit fly traps. As seen from the ‘front side’ machine parts corresponding to the function of the fruit fly organs at those locations can be seen. The fruit fly brain has been mapped into the most complete connectome, or wiring diagram, of any animal brain ever made and was made into an interactive website where humans can browse through it in an attempt to understand, amongst other things, which neurons are used during special courtship habits. Fruit flies serenade each other by vibrating their wings rapidly to create a complex song of hums and chirps. The songs however, can never be heard in their original form and intention by the human ear. The textile that envelops and protects the space in/of the sculpture has a print on 1:1 scale of an Alocasia leaf, dropped by its plant for energy management.

In the new sculpture ‘Boring Billion Bellows’ the flexible bellows wraps around a ceramic event that bulges out of it like a hernia. A short text about a 1.4-billion-year-old air bubble that was destroyed so the ancient atmosphere could be analyzed is spoken into the object. The sculpture being an object about a time period, problems around the relation between space and time naturally emerge. A character from the spoken text resolves them seemingly easily in the following sentences:  ‘The Cambrian critter, adorned with fan shaped diatoms for a futuristic look, doesn’t think of time any more than as something viscoelastic. A butter swirl of sorts.’