highlike

KIKA THORNE

Singularity

Kika Thorne

source: highlike

From Kika Thorne: The WILDcraft, published by the Art Gallery of Windsor ISBN 978-0-919837-84-3 Common Gravity: Kika Thorne’s Tension Sculptures by Jesse Birch How do we see physically? No differently than we do in our consciousness—by means of the productive power of imagination. Consciousness is the eye and the ear, the sense for inner and outer meaning. – Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg (Novalis) Most of what you are about to read was typed out on the edge of sleep: in those fragile hours of early morning. While these hours were kept due to the everyday logistics of living with a three-year-old, perhaps it was for the best. Writing on the verge of delirium, boundaries become malleable, and possibilities expand. It is, in fact, in this fertile territory that much of Kika Thorne’s work begins to take shape. As she recently conveyed to me: “the role of sleep in my practice cannot be underestimated. All the best work comes out of sleep and that subtle state just after waking …” Thorne’s recent works primarily consist of precisely elasticized sculptural installations that act as material responses to scientific fields of investigation. From quantum mechanics to colour theory, Thorne’s inspirations may not seem like the productions of an oneiric state of mind, but the works don’t just tarry with the quantitative: they glance towards the infinite while merging with the immediate spaces they inhabit. The works evoke an experience of what fellow dreamer, Surrealist Roger Caillois, considers “a peculiar yielding to the call of ‘space’ … a failure to maintain the boundaries between inside and outside, between, that is, figure and ground.” The first time I physically experienced one of Thorne’s works, it was in the process of being installed. It was a delicate yet invasive operation. By the hands of surgeons (or maybe Surrealists) the gallery’s walls were encroached upon. Drywall, plywood, and years of built-up titanium white were sliced and pierced, then threaded with thin elastic cords of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. The cords were pulled, stretched and tugged through correspondingly-coloured Plexiglas plates suspended perfectly in the centre in the gallery. Floating just inches above one another, the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black squares hovered in sequence approximately five feet in the air in the middle of the room, the coloured strands shooting straight out horizontally from each of the plate’s four corners. The cords were not attached to the walls, but rather looped into and through them; the gallery and the sculpture became one. This structural co-dependency created the appearance that the walls were absorbing the cords of colour in the same way that our retinal cavities absorb reflected light, ensuring physiological contact with the chromatic world. Through this work, bodies were implicated not only by way of light reflecting against photoreceptors, but also through phenomenological negotiations with space. Entitled Separation, the work was produced for an exhibition I curated at Vancouver’s Access Gallery in the summer of 2009 called The Cast of Shadows. At the time, Access was located on Carrall Street, a kind of intersection between the upscale Gastown commercial district and the historically low-income Downtown East Side. In 2009 a different set of colours—the blue, yellow, black, green, and red interlinked rings of the upcoming Winter Olympics—brought their own tensions. Real estate speculation was increasing, rent prices rising, and with one hundred new surveillance cameras being installed, residents were being documented like never before. The Cast of Shadows was inspired by nineteenth-century master of literary realism Honoré de Balzac, who believed that when a photograph was taken, a spectral layer was transferred from the subject through the ether and onto the camera’s sensitized plate. Following Balzac, the exhibition endeavoured to respond to the physiological side of photography, and Thorne’s contribution articulated this intention with force. Through Separation, the main gallery was partitioned into small, high-tension, rectangular quadrants. This segmentation of space meant that conversations at the opening, which would typically be organic and concentric, either tended toward segregation or were spoken fleetingly across the coloured lines. The elastic cords were easy to duck under, but there is something subconsciously restricting about stripes of colour; these ones, strung taut at head-height, generally elicited a particular kind of reverential apprehension, at least until a drunken visitor was moved to strum them enthusiastically. CMYK, the chemical rainbow of mechanical reproduction, reflects back to us something of our primordial phylogeny. In particular, black carries the key to a kind of chromatic eternal return. From black gold to black ink, both industrial plastics and chemical dyes were developed from petroleum and coal tar extracts. In this way, maybe Balzac was right: through the medium’s reliance on fossil fuels, each photographic reproduction does extract something from our collective life-force. Separation suggests a type of copying, the kind that occurs through mimetic encounters between people and things, and the light reflected off and between them. This sort of mimicry befuddles our ability to negotiate between perception and experience; in the gallery our bodies negotiate cyan, magenta, yellow and black stripes and squares floating on white. But colours are perceptual magicians: they show their hands front and back and often demonstrate exactly how the trick is done, but in the end they fool us anyway. This is what Teller, the master of magical sleight-of-hand, calls “Exploiting the efficiencies of your mind.” Does the average person consciously notice the colour shift that occurs when stepping out of bluish daylight and into the warm incandescent light typical of art spaces? This distortion and instant correction certainly matters to works whose resonance depends on the accuracy of colour. Photographers working with analog technology agonize in the pitch-blackness of the colour darkroom over the density of the magenta, yellow, and cyan filters through which negative images are projected. And, when they finally feel that they have the colour just right, a decision to display the work under fluorescent rather than tungsten light will throw the whole thing off. Kika Thorne, who for many years worked primarily with experimental film and video, is certainly attuned to the subtleties of chromatic changes and how these shifts are experienced both optically and physiologically. Thorne’s media-based work, while often situated in the context of diaristic or personal documentary, was marked by particular attention to the structural language of the medium. She approached her films as portraits, and yielded cinematically to her subjects, applying filmic techniques in an attempt to evoke something of her subjects beyond the possibilities of representation. While there was a distinct break between Thorne’s cinematic work and her spatial interventions, the representation of something outside of the work’s immediate material conditions is an ongoing concern. Much of her sculptural work hovers in the zone between the indexical and the abstract. It is this formal irresolution that makes Separation such an evocative work. Colour itself has no material presence and yet the work, its own aporia, proposes one. While bodies are always highly implicated in the presence of Thorne’s work, the forms point to phenomena that exist but that one can never truly know. Singularity (2006 – ?) clearly articulates this constructive dichotomy. The sculpture consists of two large sheets of lycra, one black and one pink, pulled taut at the corners. The black sheet hovers above the pink one. Small but powerful rare earth magnets are placed above and below the sheets so that they come together as two mirroring funnels. The work and its title, Singularity, evoke the black hole, that standard of both quantum mechanics and science fiction. Singularities are the places at the centre of black holes where the curvatures of spacetime become infinite. Thorne’s Singularity also offers a glimpse towards the infinite. The work is phenomenologically accessible, but points us towards a conceptual abyss. When Steven Hawking explains the phenomena of black holes in A Brief History of Time, he does so from the position of a human body. He sets up his discussion in relation to an intrepid astronaut on the surface of a collapsing star who is soon stretched like spaghetti, torn apart, or sucked through a wormhole, ending up in another universe completely. This visceral, bodily explanation of the science of black holes is both a handy pedagogical tool and a means of engaging with the existential threshold that the black hole represents. Black holes threaten us not only with the unknown universe itself, but also with that which is beyond even the possibilities of speculation. They evoke what is, according to Immanuel Kant’s description, the quintessentially sublime. In The Critique of Judgement, Kant explains the experience of the sublime as “at once a feeling of displeasure, arising from the inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain to its estimation by reason, and a simultaneously awakened pleasure, arising from this very judgement of the inadequacy of the greatest faculty of sense being in accord with ideas of reason.” The outer space beyond this world that we can never know reminds us of that other forever unknown, the passage from life to death. While living through the drive to die, when we consider what’s next, we either tell stories or we fall apart. There have always been sublime horizons, places that are so far beyond the realm of speculation that the only way to explain them is through myth. The event horizon surrounding black holes has a lot in common with the horizons at the edge of oceans where, until Pythagoras showed otherwise, the Earth dropped off into an imagined abyss of monsters and demons. If we cross one threshold we are chewed to bits, or sucked up, torn to pieces and spat out the other side. By relating the black hole to a human body Stephen Hawking tames the sublime in terrible terms that we mortal beings can understand. Kika Thorne’s Singularity avoids this problem through what I see as a phenomenological jump-cut. We experience the work in direct relation to our bodies, and can process it through intellection, but by evoking the infinite through form, in a snap, the work opens up the possibility of tarrying with that which is beyond all comprehension. The sublime is not necessarily in the work itself (for Kant an art of the sublime is impossible), but it is in the territory towards which the work points. It would be a mistake to make a simple equation between Singularity, or any of Thorne’s work for that matter, and an isolated existential experience. Even Singularity brings community. Philosopher Jacques Rancière points out that “Politics, indeed, is not the exercise of, or struggle for, power. It is the configuration of a specific space, the framing of a particular sphere of experience, of objects posited as common and as pertaining to a common decision, of subjects recognized as capable of designating these objects and putting forward arguments about them.” Thorne retains this possibility by engaging with the precarious territory between material phenomena and social relations. Like black holes that open up whenever a sun implodes, Thorne’s tension sculptures can appear in different constellations. Singularity has been installed in contexts as diverse as the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver and the 2010 G8 Summit Designated Protest Zone in Huntsville, Ontario, where it was installed suspended by aspens and maples in a farmer’s field. Completely missing the work’s socio-political form of spatial agency, the RCMP inquired if she would use it as a catapult. The strength of Thorne’s tension sculptures lies not in their ability to project forces outwards, but to draw energy inwards. In the context of a protest zone where one would be likely to find placards with pointed slogans and other confrontational articulations, Thorne’s work reverses polarity and carries political agency through its very openness. There is no limit to the concerns that could be pulled into a sculpture that mimics the form of that which swallows all matter. Much of Thorne’s sculptural work offers a field for discourse that is both open and yet directed by an indexical spark. By yielding to their installation contexts works like Separation and Singularity allow viewers to experience them as both semi-autonomous objects articulating through material and form and architectural elements that can be activated in a state of embodied interaction. In Separation gallery visitors were literally framed by the colours of mass reproduction, articulating the phenomenological force of any encounter with the image sphere. Singularity, on the other hand, presents a model of an impossible encounter. It points towards an experience that can only be calculated by particle physics, or envisioned in the far reaches of the imagination. Both of these works may have originated through dreams, but they present a kind of lucidity that encourages consideration of exactly where we are in the universe. – Jesse Birch 2012 Personal interview with the artist. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Boston: MIT Press, 1994), 155. The “K” in this acronym refers not to the colour black but to the use of the black Key plate that prints the detailed foundation of an image to which the other coloured inks align. For this point I am indebted to Ester Leslie and Michael Taussig, who both discuss it in different contexts. Jonah Lehrer, “Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion,” Wired Magazine 17.05 (April 20, 2009), http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/17-05/ff_neuroscienceofmagic/?currentPage=all. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York: Bantam, 1988), 88. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. by James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 89. Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 24.
Photographer: Scott Massey
Image: courtesy of the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver
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source: galerie-zkde

Kika Thorne’s constructivist installation partitions, dissects and parasitically claims the space it occupies through magnetic opposition. Deftly extending their potential, materials commercially available in the dressmakers shop and hardware store take a tensile hold on the architecture of the gallery, forming a model of an impossible physics for the viewer to negotiate.

Kika Thorne received her MFA from the University of Victoria, Canada in 2007 and has exhibited extensively, including projects at the Contemporary Art Gallery, The Apartment, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and Access in Vancouver; Portikus, Frankfurt; Kino Arsenal, Berlin; the Power Plant, Toronto and Murray Guy, New York City. Galerie ZK presents her first solo gallery exhibition in Berlin.
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source: akimboca

Modern era ideals, such as those of Moholy-Nagy whose work embodied egalitarian politics and constructivist aesthetics, are extended in the recent work of Kika Thorne. Her installation, Singularity, precisely fills the modest showroom at ZK Gallery. Updating the modern legacy with contemporary materials including Lycra and common hardware, Thorne’s installation is reminiscent of an autonomous form by an artist such as Noam Gaubo, but is actually based on a cosmological model and can be cleverly adapted to fit a variety of contexts. Thorne has installed this stretch-to-fit work in numerous public and gallery contexts, each instance offering a renewed relation between form, space, and experience.