Sarah Brasier
no rain, no rainbow
15 March - 15 April 2023
Opening 3-5pm Saturday 18 March
Sarah Brasier’s practice blends autobiographical experience with fragments of visual culture she encounters in daily life through text, memes, news cycles, as well as motifs from western mythology and the natural world. Centring on non-human protagonists, her paintings often playfully explore the gaps and slippages between the inner lives of objects and creatures that inhabit the human world. Brasier playfully interrogates humanity’s existence whilst encouraging feelings of unity and connectivity in a world that can sometimes feel like it is falling apart.
Brasier’s exhibition, no rain, no rainbow, is a series of vignettes related to her major new painting, The spring of my life (2023), exhibited in Melbourne Now at the National Gallery of Victoria. The spring of my life borrows its title from an autobiographical work of the same name by renowned Japanese haiku poet Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828), the work of whom Brasier encountered during her time spent living in Japan. Taught at every Japanese school, Issa’s works maintain a relevance to the present day and a deep compassion for all forms of life, often focusing on birds, flowers, insects and other small creatures of the natural world. Brasier explores how we might experience our lives free of modern-day obligations and distractions, through embracing Issa’s attentiveness to the small details of the natural world, and how they can teach us larger lessons about human behaviour.
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Sarah Brasier (b. 1990, Ballarat, works on Gunditjmara and Wurundjeri land) is a current participant in the Gertrude Studio Program (2020-2023). She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne in 2018; a Diploma of Visual Art at RMIT University in 2014; and a Bachelor of Applied Science (Geology) at Federation University in Ballarat in 2010.
no rain, no rainbow at Daine Singer is Brasier’s first solo exhibition. Brasier has held two person exhibitions with Matthew Harris at Gertrude Contemporary (2022) and TCB Art Inc (2021) and with Jemi Gale at Outer Space, Brisbane (2022). She has been included in group exhibitions at the National Gallery of Victoria, Gertrude Contemporary, NADA, Bundoora Homestead, Arthouse Gallery, Bus Projects, West Space and Toba, Mie Prefecture, Japan. Daine Singer has previously presented her work in Reduction to Satire, curated by Fatos Üstek for NADA online.
With an interest in the notion of friendship as a creative catalyst, in 2016 Brasier founded the Winter1706 art fair, presenting a series of exhibitions by early career artists across a series of vacant apartments on St Kilda Road, Melbourne. She has also curated projects at SEVENTH Gallery, Melbourne, where she is on the board of directors, Firstdraft, Sydney, and more. In 2017, Brasier was awarded a New Colombo Plan Scholarship by the Department of Trade and Foreign Affairs, living in Japan for eighteen months and completing a semester at Joshibi University of Fine Art in Tokyo.
Sarah Brasier
no rain no rainbow, 2023
acrylic paint, kiln dried birch on hoop pine stretchers
30 x 40 cm
“Brasier uses cute as an aesthetic category to examine our limited agency under capitalism. These cute critters are trapped in what we call “the daily grind”, imbued with the feelings of futility and apathy that come with human existence.”
Sarah Brasier
In all the good times I find myself longin' for change and in the bad times I fear myself, 2023
acrylic paint, kiln dried birch on hoop pine stretchers
30 x 40 cm
“Brasier explores two possible worlds within a world, how the daily grind might be experienced by anthropomorphic flowers who are chained to their Macbooks and by contrast, Magpies singing karaoke while the words “call in sick” appear Issa-esque in a rainbow.”
INSTALLATION VIEWS
photographs: Tim Gresham
“Underscoring Issa’s philosophy is a sense of mono no aware, a Japanese idiom describing a sense of beauty tinged with an awareness of impermanence, and it’s with this lens that Brasier approaches her own The spring of my life: a two-metre-wide landscape painting replete with birds, flowers and other symbols of the natural world.”
