Somewhere Beyond Nowhere
Tara Nicholson
September 7 to October 6, 2012
Opening Friday, September 7, 7 to 10pm
Deluge Contemporary Art
636 Yates Street, Victoria
Exhibition Hours: Wed to Sat, 12 to 5 pm
Since completing her MFA thesis work two years ago, Wilderness and Other Utopias
photographed in Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, Tara Nicholson has integrated the
peripatetic tendency prevalent in so much of contemporary art practice further into
her work, using travel and temporary relationship as keys for developing a body of
work based on locations in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec and Holland.
She insinuates herself into new communities to determine local byways, campsites and
landmarks, temporary shelters and ephemeral spectacles: a swimming hole in an
abandoned quarry, ski-doo graveyard, a decaying papier-mâché mascot killer whale,
dumped like a corpse at the edge of summer woods.
A phrase in Nicholson’s exhibition statement undertakes the contradictory conjoining
of “local and remote.” This in itself is a comment on the disjunctive way that
modern development thrusts fragments of suburbia into what was previously
wilderness, at the same time leaving behind pockets of dilapidation in the form of
desolated retreats of past-tense recreational seclusion or forsaken networks of
resource extraction infrastructure. Lapsed, lost or unlikely habitation abounds in
this work, from a teepee on Salt Spring Island, to a flagging Conservative campaign
sign tacked to an aging industrial compressor, to a rustic tower clad in pristine
Tyvek; the vacated hideaway, the forgotten boomtown, or subcultural otherworld gone
to seed. In one of the images from Holland, Kuierpadtien, the torqued sheath of a
worn blue water slide relays the colours of an improbably idyllic tableau of
children paddling on an artificial lake. Nicholson seeks out visions that in her
words, “hover between reality and fantasy,” a fluxing of nature and artifice too
precious or precarious to last forever.
Nicholson relies on firsthand experience and anecdote, noting, “often I try and find
a place from memory or look for things I specifically remember, textures, light or
structures.” Paradoxically, she employs this well-tuned sense of place to “challenge
identity,” and its attendant territoriality, citing John O’Brian and Peter White’s
book, Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity and Contemporary Art
(McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), which, in unravelling the nationalist
mythology of Canadian landscape, examines the way notions of “northernness” and
“wilderness” became part of the country’s cultural identity in the early twentieth
century. Nicholson is interested in the persistence of such myths, even as her own
approach echoes the restless explorations of early Canadian painting (the title of
her show almost an answer to a recent survey of Emily Carr at the Art Gallery of
Greater Victoria, On the Edge of Nowhere.)
Outside of the viewfinder’s capture, some moment of human interaction is often part
of the picture. Nonetheless, Nicholson chooses in many (but not all) cases to
exclude figures from her work. This creates an ambiguous but charged scene,
recalling Hemingway’s dictum that a story should include purposeful omissions in the
crafting of its narrative. Those that remain are often strikingly isolated, as in
one particularly vertiginous composition of a naked woman floating in a lake
overlooked by a fire-scorched horizon of dessicated pines (this turns out to be a
self-portrait), or a trio of riders on an overcast beach that merges blurs in hooves
and hair with roving patches of grey on the horses and sand into something
inaudible, emblematic and weightless with nostalgia.
Tara Nicholson grew up in Northern British Columbia, spending time in the Okanagan
and on Vancouver Island. She has attended artist residencies in Newfoundland and
Banff, and exhibited work across Canada, at The Parisian Laundry Gallery, Montreal,
The Jeffery Boone Gallery, Vancouver and a recent exhibition in the 2012 Calgary
Banff Canmore Exposure Photography Festival. Nicholson teaches at the Vancouver
Island School of Art and the University of Victoria.
— John Luna