Where am I exactly? And what am I doing here? Wait, is this a gallery? It seems to be
Lucy’s place. But who even is Lucy? And where has she gone? Does she work or live here?
I can see traces of her; sense that she was here just a moment ago. Yes, see, she was sit-
ting over there, writing at her desk. “Lucy?” I crane my neck to peer deeper into the room.
It looks dark. Maybe she’s back there. Yes, I think I can hear her. “Excuse me, Lucy?”…
Robert Brambora’s exhibition at MAMOTH is intimate and yet strangely unnerving, in
part because of a sense of familiarity that is never fulfilled. There are hints of the epony-
mous Lucy, though while the viewer has been invited into this protagonist’s space, she
is nowhere to be seen. Lucy has disappeared. We piece together fragments that point
towards who this person may be, how she lives, and what she feels.
Why should we care about Lucy; why should this complete stranger matter to us? Bramb-
ora wants “to show the invisible,” weaving into existence a character who may or may not
be fictitious, who we may or may not ever truly know. His interest is not in the big reveal
of who Lucy really is, or where she has gone, but rather, in the idea of searching for sub-
jectivity in the ineffable, amid the facelessness of the urbanity. Can we ever really know
someone, anyone – even ourselves?
I think of Hannah Arendt, in her belief of never confusing biography with the life of the
mind, that we are two-in-one, and as such, the search for identify is always futile: that
even with the work of constant reflection, questioning, and perplexity, we ultimately
remain a mystery to ourselves. Fast-forward over half a century, and the complexity of
selfhood is now increasingly being swallowed by big data. We are converted into ex-
tremely large and diverse collections of structured and unstructured statistics that grow
exponentially over time. Brambora asks, who are we, really?
On the ground floor of this Gesamtkunstwerk, Brambora presents a scenario that inter-
weaves painting with furniture and light sculptures. The atmosphere is intimate, chan-
nelling the warmth and imperfection of the lived-in environment. In a space lined with
thick black curtains, a gentle, pulsing light is emitted by Brambora’s lamp sculptures;
black storage boxes are haphazardly stacked in corners atop another. Lucy’s presence
is felt through these objects, reflecting the overlapping facets of her life and creating a
sense of interiority of the untapped psyche and subjective memory.
As its own form of stage design, there are dramaturgical aspects to every object in this
room: small ceramic scenes are illuminated beneath the lamps, speaking to the uncanny
nature of fantasies and dreams, of the violence that Lucy encounters in the city, of the
loneliness she feels. Household items are arranged idiosyncratically and handled with
Lucy’s individual care. Winking at modes of existential theatre such as Samuel Beckett’s
absurdism, Brambora has a desire to knock at the symbolic gates of the inner self, at the
irrational will to find meaning within a seemingly meaningless world.
Another aspect of this mise-en-scène is the paintings that line the walls, though it’s un-
clear whether these are by Lucy or if they depict her – if she is the muse. Perhaps the desk
is where she works: the chair is left slightly askew as if she was just here, bearing a sense
of her absence. Brambora emphasises that Lucy is at once a “co-worker, acquaintance,
artist, tenant, ghost”: she is multidimensional, and a spectral, layered narrative is estab-
lished within this environment to convey the merging of Lucy’s personal and professional
life, as well as her inner and outer worlds.
One painting depicts a cityscape at night, bathed in hues of scarlet red. High-rise
buildings consume the surface plane, illuminated windows doubling as pixels, row upon
row of small geometric forms that glisten within the dark surround. Perhaps there is
a person behind each tiny pane of glass, but to us, they are invisible, existing only as
light and obscured by the structures holding them. Vast billboards slice into the scene,
revealing close-ups of someone’s eyes – Lucy’s? Her irises are pale and yellowing, and
with a ghostly sense of disassociation, her face stares straight out at the viewer, though
vacantly, obscured as a half-reveal.
Brambora considers the relationship between the individual and society and is inter-
ested in how the former is clouded by the latter, obfuscated by a system that asks us to
perform robotically. He wants to get under the skin of societal expectations and asks
how “the demands, the things you have to do impact your personal aims, your personal
interests.”
There is also another dimension symbolized in the painting, comprised of language that
is printed in different sizes and floats as geometric forms. I strain to read. Some is so
tiny as to be barely legible, a rambling flow of information that speaks to everything and
nothing at once. Brambora gathered these lines from a website that holds thousands
of data sets. In these, people are reduced to language, their subconscious complexities
distilled into facts, figures, numbers, and statistics; their existential questions and fears
sifted through as part of wider commercial analysis. We are quantifiable as pure data.
Brambora considers our different levels of perception amid such systemic detachment:
he gets closer and closer, revealing the intimacies of ambitions and anxieties, and then
zooms out again, switching between registers and intensities.
On the lower ground floor of the gallery, a starker white cube space is encountered, one
in which another painting of an urban metropolis is, this time, tinged with darker notes of
purple and yellow. It is a strange doppelganger of the work upstairs, reminiscent and yet
somehow new, different, and uncanny. A discomforting sense of repetition ensues: of the
inescapability of becoming lost within the crowd, of the unknowability of the self, of our
ultimate insignificance.
A row of ceramic sculptures listens intently from the wall. These giant ears are glazed in
shimmering gold, and within their gentle folds, smaller ears are nestled in a surreal mise
en abyme, hearing fainter and fainter sounds as we go deeper and deeper into this organ.
It speaks to the silence of introspection and of searching for our own interiority, as does
the painting’s opposite: shaped like the silhouette of a head, it reveals the inner imag-
inings of a perfectly serene landscape, a place of escape or freedom, complete with lilac
clouds and rolling fields.
In the pursuit of Lucy, Brambora asks the audience to navigate the different roles that we
play in our own lives, distilling the small moments of schizophrenia that we may feel when
these don’t fit together. What happens in that disjuncture? He establishes an atmos-
pheric space in which he calls for not only for our curiosity but, ultimately, an embodied
will to try and unpick what he sees as the “individual alienation, social masks, and the
spectral residue of capitalism’s influence on personal identity.”
