FLO BROOKS: SCRUBBERS

9 Nov-15 Dec 2018

Overview

In a new series of acrylic on board paintings, the exhibition brings together notions of cleanliness, normativity and morality in a dramatized satirical fiction, exploring the ways the body is manipulated through the lens of hygiene. Brooks describes a fictional commercial cleaning company, Scrubbers, as they work their way through a number of familiar institutional spaces: the public toilet, the gym, the psychotherapy room, punctuated by coffee and cigarette breaks. Instead of working undisturbed into the night, their schedule takes them into opening hours, and both the cleaners and service users clash in space, confronted, undermined and disrupted by each other’s tasks. Equipment is broken, or has mutated over time, visible plumbing is ineffective or obsolete, the technologies of hygiene that steer these spaces and their occupants into production are destabilized, rendering the spaces obsolete, sullied, soiled.