faux light falling on drawn drapes - (2018)
so shallow that you tend to be lonely - (2018)
You body passed through Nicole Kelly Westmans faux light falling on drawn drapes as you entered the gallery space, and again as you moved from one room into the next. The mottled patterns on these silk curtains were made through an outmoded light filtering device called a cuculoris, used to create atmospheric shadows for photography, theatre, and film sets. In this case the artist created a custom cucoloris based on dappled winter light passing into her bedroom.
She projected light through the cuculouris and coloured gels to make artificial patterns on artificial curtains, which were photographed in studio and printed on the real drapes now in the gallery. Westman employs the cucoloris to highlight photography’s capacity to manipulate both meaning and memory. The short poems embroidered on faux light falling on drawn drapes suggest a desire to hold on to a recollection, not only of atmospheric winter light, but also of a human encounter. We cannot, however, discern the authenticity of either experience.
Westman’s so shallow that you tend to be lonely takes the custom cucoloris that she made in order to create artificial light, and renders it artificial. Here, a mirror, a coloured gel, and a translucent image of the cucoloris, all ingredients associated with photographic manipulation, are brought from the background to the foreground as both materials and subject.
EXHIBITION TEXT: Fulhame’s Map - Nanaimo Art Gallery
CURATED BY: Jesse Birch
APRIL, 2018
REVIEWS:
New Nanaimo Art Gallery show ‘Fulhame’s Map’ explores the ‘language of images’ for Nanaimo Bulletin by Josef Jacobson
Fulhame’s Map - Reviews - for Canadian Art by Lucien Durey