Skimming Surfaces: Brodie Kokkinos
Brodie Kokkinos is a conceptual artist whose practice spans across video, photography, sculpture, installation and performance. Motivated by the haunting power of visual culture Kokkinos explores ways to visually reimagine the slippery seductive power of such popular imagery in alternative timelines and circumstances.
Skimming Surfaces is a spatialised exhibition conjoining two floors of MARS Gallery. The exhibition features a photographic installation on the mezzanine level and a large-scale moving image work in the black box room of the basement.
In Skimming Surfaces, Brodie Kokkinos combines methods of photography, performance, and installation to generate slippage behind the controlled aesthetic surface of commercial portraiture. Working with her own image, this project marks a new direction of conceptual inquiry for the artist's ongoing investigation into the malevolent forces within image-making systems like advertising, film, cinema, and contemporary art.
Amassing as a 2 x 3-meter photographic installation, these works distil moments captured during the production process of a commercial fashion shoot.The artist places her performing self at the cusp of the forces she interrogates - fashion, visual language - meeting them, and unravelling them.
Something of this work hovers in processual and the transformative. It is not important if viewers identify the action of eye rolling, or correlate it to its meaning as a social gesture. Instead, the action—or perhaps the expression—of the face remains indecipherable, ambiguous, made eerie by subtle yet undeniably dramatic distortion. The prints command both material space and a strong frontal address, while the anti-address of my face-in-motion opens up a more ambiguous, sensual, perhaps even comical, felt space between gallery visitor and artist as subject.
My investigation into eye-rolling began with a found image of Megan Fox, her eyes rolling back. Captivated by the gesture's dichotomy —simultaneously dismissive yet sensual —I searched for similar images of stylised celebrities caught in this seemingly involuntary act. Initially, I viewed eye-rolling as a rebellion against the gaze, a subversive, seductive assertion of power. However, during the shoot, as I repeated the action endlessly, I faced a profound loss of control.
- Brodie Kokkinos, on the studio process of Skimming Surfaces.
Shifting Surfaces is a moving-image work that has emerged from one of the artist’s research collections. With these research collections, Kokkinos meticulously selects hundreds of images of targeted subjects over time, sourced online from photoshoots, archive runway videos or scenes from films, and other pools of content for celebrity and beauty markets. In this case, images of well-known celebrities are amassed as a bank of faces that epitomise a particular aesthetic style or type.
Brodie’s interest lies in the semiotic, rather than the anatomical, as she trades in a femme goth aesthetic that exemplifies archetypes like Megan Fox and her precedents… It is a stylish type that is hard to describe without tired language (“femme fatale”) but this linguistic problem seems to be the core of the exhibition: it shows, rather than tells, how to arrive at this particular media type.
- Diego Ramirez, on the continued themes of Kokkinos’ Exhibitions.[1]
Shifting Surfaces found its form for this exhibition through Kokkinos' experimental methods of intervening in and between visual materials. Manifesting as a moving image work, AI has expanded as a tool for temporal composition and processing—where comparison, analysis, and synthesis can be explored conceptually through the machinery of generative intelligence.
These works act to surface and circumvent the forces of image-making cultures. Through time-based experiments, Kokinos’ works are studies - they hone in, slow down, and open out existing mechanisms in this material, using art practice as a mode of analysis and translation.
