Exhibition at the Bunkier Sztuki Gallery is the first solo exhibition of this young British artist who is interested in moments of disruption, chaos and failure. In 2016 Moss came under the spotlight in the British media when she got stranded in the Pacific aboard the Hanjin Geneva, a shipping container travelling from Vancouver to Shanghai where the artist had signed up for a 23-day-long residency (23 Days at Sea Container Ship Residency project with Access Gallery), after the owners of the ship, Hanjin Shipping Company, had declared bankruptcy just a week into her planned journey. It is as if this absurd story has been staged by the artist herself, as her art is reminiscent of situation comedies based on the premise of getting stuck.
In her most recent works, mainly short-form videos created in the poetic burlesque style typical of the artist, Moss comes back to the banks of the River Thames in her native Essex to critically examine heroic narratives in relation to surrounding landscape through “camera-targeted activities” that interfere with nature minimally, if at all. For these videos she often builds ridiculously complex structures out of ordinary mass-produced everyday items, e.g., toys. Aesthetically, they resemble Rube Goldberg machines or contraptions from popular DIY Challenge YouTube videos. These seemingly haphazard but in fact deliberately executed contrivances designed to perform trivially simple tasks elicit a wide range of emotions that exist between expectation and surprise, disappointment and failure. (Anna Bargiel, curator of the exhibition)
Rebecca Moss (born in 1991) is a British artist known for her short-form videos and absurd scenarios. She creates comic vignettes, often featuring her as the main character, for which she embeds mass-produced objects into nature landscapes. These seemingly haphazard but in fact deliberately executed contrivances designed to perform trivially simple tasks elicit a wide range of emotions that exist between expectation and surprise, disappointment and failure. Raw and random at first sight, while actually carefully planned and structured, these videos set the ridiculous and banal against the monumental and sublime.
