The Brother’s Quay

In an interview with these two brother’s, although I should really say one, it is mentioned that they don’t like their work to be described as surreal for fear of mis-using the term. I then traveled to another site about the pair and that fear was exemplified by the use of the term surreal several times throughout, in description of their work.

I think their work clearly goes beyond surreal. I have always thought of surrealism as almost a juxtaposition of two or more very different ideas or images . The Brother’s Quay actually create whole “other” worlds that seem to function in and of themselves without the intervention of some object or image that bears no association to the setting. The videos that I have seen are complete, it all makes sense within this world that they have constructed, not surreal at all, just alien. It only becomes surreal because we want to make sense of it somehow, to compare it to what we know and experience in this reality. But The Brother’s Quay live an a world that is uniquely their own-

“For us it’s invisible, we don’t even notice it. You’re only reminded that you’re a twin when you walk down the street together and people stare at you. Actually, we passed two old women today, identical twins, probably in their seventies, and immediately we thought “Jesus, will we look that bad when we get old?”, “Why don’t they just part?”, and we had to admit that they were slightly freaks. People of course expect us, as well, to eventually part and to become normal people, to have an individual life, but we find that being twins insulates us quite nicely from the demands of reality. ” -interview, The Brother’s Quay.

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