Why is it that in my studio there is nothing fixed, nothing rigid? All these blocks, all these shapes to be shifted and juggled with and the experiment grows and grows.
- Constantin Brâncuși, 1927
Constantin Brâncuși was after transcendence, his practice a lofty play with form and essence. Margaret Honda’s formal investigations in film, photography and sculpture also strip material and artmaking bare via reduced and deceptively simple inquiries. Like how steady is the relationship between a photograph and a fixed moment in time? What if it tracked real time? Or can a sculpture—finished and exhibited decades ago—become malleable again, unhinged from linear temporality? Brâncuși also saw his sculpture as continuously changing and used photography (counter to the medium’s supposed fixedness) to capture stills from a transformative process involving light, time and interactions with surroundings. He staged constellations of sculpture and objects in his Parisian studio and photographed single sculptures from various angles, sometimes slightly out of focus, with low or high contrast. He was especially drawn to the glint of direct light.
Margaret Honda (*1961, San Diego, CA) is an LA-based artist and experimental filmmaker. Selected solo exhibitions include Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin; Treize, Paris; Künstlerhaus Bremen; Triangle France, Marseille and The Drawing Center, New York. Her work was also exhibited in Made in LA, Hammer Museum in 2014 and 2016 and her films have been screened in Berlinale Forum Expanded, Berlin; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge and the National Portrait Gallery, London, among others.
Constantin Brâncuși’s (*1876, Hobita, Romania - 1957, Paris) integrated approach to sculpture and photography was as pioneering as his modernist sculptural forms. Brâncuși bequeathed roughly 700 negatives and just over 1600 prints to the French state when he died, having gifted numerous prints to friends and lovers throughout his life. His work was most recently the subject of a retrospective at Bozar, Brussels last year and will figure prominently in a Modigliani — Picasso exhibition at the Albertina, Vienna this fall.
