Nicole Coon: Jetée

September 19 – October 6, 2024

Curated by Kate Whiteway

In the deep of July, I visited the High Park labyrinth. Without reading the plaque or ever having walked a labyrinth before, I knew that I was being invited to enter it with a question. In their design, but more importantly, in the movement they provoke, labyrinths act as tools for consciousness. Delineating space, they condition entry while simultaneously creating and protecting their centre. Jill Purce, author of The Mystic Spiral, infers that labyrinths are symbolic iterations of spirals that themselves occur in plants, animals, the cyclicality of seasons, galaxies, and so on. Spirals are the structure that hold against the otherwise unchecked flow into the unknown. They cosmosize what is otherwise chaos.¹ It is with this interest in the potency of spiral symbol that Nicole has created the works in this exhibition.

Nicole made the first prototype for her jetty light in 2018 during a residency at Anderson Ranch in Colorado, USA called “Experimental Lighting: Form & Volume” led by Andy Buck and Russell Baldon. She was inspired by Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) and earthworks more generally, looking to them for inspiration for creating works outside of a gallery, and for rendering materials in dynamic tension through unlikely contact. Her prompt to herself: What material can create a spiral and what can be used to hold it to its shape?

The bamboo in Nicole’s jetty light is taken from pre-assembled blinds, while the guides that hold the threaded bamboo strands are in painted blue plywood. As with the individual pieces of basalt in Spiral Jetty, here the elements of bamboo, plywood, and LEDs unify as one work through the persuasion of the spiral form. The plywood guides are placed according to the progression of a logarithmic spiral.² This type of spiral feels as though its speed increases outward from the point of centre.³ Nicole’s jetty light achieves an emotive feeling of accelerating, kinetic energy. The materials, though static, evoke a path of movement through the tension they are put in by the guided, superimposed form of the spiral.

“I think when people visit exhibitions, particularly large exhibitions, they tend to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of works and find it difficult to study and ‘experience’ them in a relaxed way. The exhibits flash past like the countryside seen from the window of an express train.”⁴ So said the director of the One Picture Gallery, a branch of the Savitsky Regional Picture Gallery in Penza, Russia whose program consisted of exhibiting one painting at a time.⁵ The simplicity of Jetée, in terms of the inclusion of one work in the gallery and two works in the gallery’s front garden, is inspired by the approach of the One Picture Gallery. Recalling how the labyrinth compels a moving meditation, viewers here are invited to experience their own slowing of time and attention.

The optimal viewing hours for this exhibition are between five and eight in the evening. Dusk is particularly interesting as the astrological precipice between day and night, the darkest stage of twilight just before nightfall. On dusk, Irish poet and mystic John O’Donohue wrote, “Trees, mountains, fields and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. The darkness absolves everything; the struggle for identity and impression falls away.”⁶ The three lights are set together on a dimmer. Their light increases with the day’s slope toward darkness; their illumination choreographed in gradual meter against the falling away of the sun.

— Kate Whiteway

Notes

1. Jill Purce, The Mystic Spiral: Journey of the Soul, 1974, London: Thames & Hudson.
2. This type of spiral is distinguished by the distance between turnings increasing in geometric progression from the point of centre. It was first described by the printmaker and painter Albrecht Dürer in 1525.
3. Depending on your perspective, it might feel like its speed increases inward towards its point of centre.
4. Valery Petrovich Sazonov, “The One-Picture Gallery,” Thinking About Exhibitions, 1996, New York: Routledge.
5. The paintings, substantive works of Soviet art, were shown during forty-minute sessions involving a slideshow relating to the painting set to music, then the unveiling of the painting from behind velvet curtains.
6. John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World, 1997, London: Bantam Press.

Documentation by Kendall Stephenson.