for every sunset, we haven’t seen - (2019)
Dunlop Gallery, Regina
March 9– April 24, 2019
for every sunset, we haven’t seen - (2019)
We want a potential that is wide and ebullient, luminous and spacious, quivering with the hues of a waning day. We like the kind assurance of the exiting sun, a finale to another day lived, ushering in the sweetness of night that falls like a blanket. We’d like a promise of perfect sunsets. Words are infinitely craftable, so let’s keep our words close to us. We watch the silk curtains as they billow to each anxious solar breath. As the tonal prosody of synthetic sunset hues washes over our visions, our promises are staged anew.
Oh what novelty it is to pick up the thin, colourful film with the index finger and thumb, place it gently over the cornea. Permutations of crafted reality sets stage for the sunset of romance, of friendship, of looking, of apocalypse, of fiery ash-curtains, of spectacle, of moss-beds with imprints of our bodies, of iridescent bed of rock flooded with sulfuric wetness. Imitation of the sunset is a well-versed practice, an immediate desire for filmmakers, nothing to be leery about. We are our own masters in the craft of fiction.
The plot thickens into a gelatinously still air, in anticipation of an event. It’s the Platonic notion that colour is “a ‘visual fire’ [that] burns between our eyes and that which they behold.”[1] The curtain, the thin film over the cornea of the camera, the visual fire, sets fire the afterimage of a red disk and its spectrums in us.
The curtain is powerful. It makes here and there, “these unfortunate adverbs with unsupervised powers.”[2] Curtains rein in the bigger misfortune of anywhere into slightly more discernible adverbs. At least we can begin the act of placemaking. Shadows are a signal to the vast depth of there, the ontological promise that lies beyond here, the there which finds its form in haunting and spills into here. Over there is an abundance of foliage that hint themselves against the silken background of drawn drapes, waving their limbs. There is a place. It is a place that is a stage for the tryouts of multiple sunsets, red, redder, orange, oranger, yellow, yellower. Here is the set of eyes. Here is where dappled lights rush in and I bask in their caress. Here and there do not exist in dichotomy, they are a spheric whole. Are we listening to the crackling of flame-engulfed firs bursting into sunset-embers? Or to the mellifluous melody of the soothing, futile raindrops striking the bone-dry forest floor? We melt into the maze of a tranquil-here and a fiery-there. In here awaits the occurrence, something that will happen, awaits you, you on the other side who lifts the drapes slightly who spills into here, but only, colour happens—a visual fire. We wait for a place of many sunsets to be borne of us, for us.
1 Maggie Nelson, Bluets, Boston: Beacon Books Press, 1994.
2 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Seattle: Wave Books, 2009.
EXHIBITION TEXT: Areum Kim
CURATED BY: Jennifer Matotek for Dunlop Art Gallery
REVIEWS:
Bathed in Rays of Dying Light featuring the work of Nicole Kelly Westman - for BlackFlash by Sandee Moore