Verena Maas “Brown”

Shedhalle / Exhibitions / Lands End / Artists

Verena Maas, Germany: “Brown” (still), documentary film, 28 min, DV, stereo, 2008

In the beginning, there’s only white, then we see traces, snow, a few skiers, and suddenly the close-up becomes a synopsis, an overview, and we see a skiing hall, featuring a chair lift and a snow making machine. And immediately another artificial landscape follows the first one. Verena Maas pictures the compulsive idyllic and precarious of artificial landscapes in an irritatingly restrained way and turns their promises of happiness against themselves.

Verena Maas, Germany: “BROWN” (still), documentary film, D/GB 2008, 28 min, DV, stereo

The camera is neutral and merciless at the same time, it gets close, too close, with seemingly endless patience she focuses on the dusty, the broken, the unfinished. She shows, as the title suggests, the brownness of the world, because “if you mix all the colours of the palette, you’ll get brown. The film shows an overdose of sensual impressions, a cacophony of colours, it refers to the standardization of modern consumption sites”, Verena Maas writes. Since the film, however, never shows the smooth surfaces alone but emphasises the gaps and the voids, the peculiar and the construed, and translates them into a very special temporality and imagery, it shows something very different, too, something deeply melancholic as well as something almost hopeful. At least the last take could bear witness to that.