Last year, Brackman made the short film “Lot Ten,” and Finn completed her slideshow “Sometimes the Desert is Red.” Both pieces were based tangentially on films by Michelangelo Antonioni—Brackman restaged scenarios loosely culled from the 1961 film La Notte to closely follow one character, while Finn rephotographed and drew images based on moments in the 1965 Red Desert in a way that emphasized the post-industrial landscape. To say that Antonioni was their point in common, however, would be to miss the point. The women were both foreign-born artists living and working in Copenhagen (Brackman is American, Finn is Swedish). Both were making and showing art in a close community where they felt simultaneously outside a homogenous culture but resident within it. Common friends had told the two to see each other’s film projects. Once they did, Brackman and Finn decided to collaborate and present the two film-inspired pieces together.

The two-person show at Southfirst is more than a collaborative screening of “Lot Ten” and “Sometimes the Desert is Red.” The name of the show is “Deserted Lot,” combining the two movie names into one. Finn created two drawn movie posters—signage for the imaginary film of their collaborative exhibition. Brackman contributed a mobile of moving architectural shapes that could imagine a space in which the two film projects meet.

By taking foreign films-the kind a person might watch as a means of dealing with isolation and loneliness-as a starting point, Brackman and Finn have created a collaborative space that carefully balances aspects of individual artistic production with shared names and signs. Their collaboration becomes a thoughtful model for community.

Brackman is a professor of art at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen. Maria Finn has collaborated extensively with the French publication Purple and shown widely, most recently at The Apartment, Athens.