Nora Curiston
Nora Curiston’s work often makes the viewers angry, and the curator of the Penticton Art Gallery was questioned for an hour by a gallery visitor, who had decided that “Structure for Supporting a Narrow Column of Air” was the reason for all that is wrong in our Canadian culture and society, and most importantly, our taxation system. The sculpture is yellow in colour, and looks like a modified lamp stand which is approximately five feet high. The top of the stand has a small circular plate that becomes the supporting structure for the narrow column of air. It was this story that first turned my attention to Curiston’s work. It reminded me of a painting critique when I was an undergrad, where through a heated discussion I suddenly realized that when we stand before a work of art, we often stand there with all of our tightly held prejudices and value judgments, instead of standing there for an open engagement of the proffered ideas. Perhaps, as Rancière suggests, this is a consequence of the passivity of viewing, or as he also writes, perhaps “there is too much pressure placed upon the spectator”.[12]
When viewing the slide of a “Structure for Supporting a Narrow Column of Air”, I was sitting in the gymnasium in the small vibrant community of Wells, BC during the artists’ talk and orientation for the Toni Onley Artist Project. The Toni Onley Artist Project is an annual residency, and part of a much larger summer program, sponsored by Island Mountain Arts that brings together mentors and artists from across North America. Yet this wasn’t really my first introduction to Curiston’s work. “Tied Down Rock” was the first work of hers that I had seen. She had a large rock, approximately six feet by six feet, moved to a location in front of the residence of the Curator of Island Mountain Arts, Julie Fowler, and proceeded to tie it down. It is not easy to tie down a rock; one must dig and prepare holes in the soil surrounding the rock, place rebar and then pour concrete, and finally use airline aviation cable for its tensile strength necessary to keep the rock in place. The work is successful in its ability to engage the viewer, by giving the viewer an unusual idea to respond to, and the title itself provides language clues to give a point of entry with which to understand the sculpture.
Nora Curiston is interested in how a little bit of art influences the viewer, and claimed that she agrees with Herbert Marcuse, who suggests that there is a radical potential in art. For Marcuse, the radical potential of art lies in the location of art as outside of capitalism, outside of the definitions of an art object to be bought and sold, an art that reflected an anti-aesthetic. [13]
Curiston suggests that her philosophy is to engage with ideas “One degree off of their centre.”[14] As an artist, Curiston has created a space for her viewers to enter, gently nudging them out of a passive space. And it is a poetically sublime space, as was evident in the 2009 exhibition at the Penticton Art Gallery. It was titled “Prepared to Receive”, and beside the vinyl letters of the exhibition title signage, was a bent car antenna, forlorn, waiting to receive anything.
Both Curiston and I remember hearing the late Peter Gzowski interviewing Donna Williams, an autistic woman on the CBC radio program “This is Morningside”. As I understood the interview, Williams had acute hypermnesiac synaesthesia, where she could see words as vibrant explosions of colours, and she stated that she and Gzowski were meeting in the colour pink. The ideas in this interview led Curiston on a rich journey of investigations regarding colour and light; could colour have a smell or weight, for example? She explored one aspect of this idea in an exhibition of her work at the Langham Cultural Centre in Kaslo, British Columbia titled “Colour: Light”, in 2010. She experimented with painting areas of a wall and specific lighting, and in the end, painted the whole room, floor, walls, pipes, etc. so that the colour was reflected back onto itself, which resulted in a rich saturation of pink colour contained within the room. The room in question was the washroom of the Cultural Centre, and the serendipity of having a mirror in the coloured room added another dimension to the concept of meeting in the colour pink, with oneself in the mirror. Another colour investigation in this exhibition was titled “3 ½ Pounds of a Colour somewhere between F033 and F037” in which Curiston folded and stacked potato sacks on a plinth. She attached to the plinth colour tags of F033 and F037- the kind of tags one gets as colour swatches at a paint store- which echo the yellow hues of the folded sacks.
Curiston continued her explorations of colour. She explored the “smell” of the colour purple by carefully preparing essential oils that subtly filled a corner of the gallery. She proposed that this olfactory event could describe the colour purple to a viewer. In her other explorations, Curiston built a machine for measuring the temperature of yellow. She was given a painting box, and the accumulated marks on the box reflected this history of painting. She then gathered materials, wires and tubing which she affixed to the box that could then yield information regarding the temperature of yellow. Curiston’s creative practice often highlights her affection for collecting certain found objects.
She used a music box with ballerina figure in her sculpture titled “Dancing in Green Light”, where she proposed in a metaphoric way that it is very difficult to be green. The work features the ballerina figure, dancing in a circular motion in the music box, attached to the wall and lit by a saturated green light. The movement of the figure also produces the movement of the shadow cast by the green light. The work suggests that all of us are faced with the difficulty of correct referencing of our ecological choices. Curiston gives the example of when she was excited to change the light bulbs in her home from the old incandescent bulbs to the newer compact fluorescent bulbs only to find out that these bulbs are difficult to recycle and place mercury in our landfills.
An issue very important to the northern part of the province is the pine beetle infestation and the extent of the destruction this small beetle has caused on the pine tree forests. The eating cycle of the pine beetle results in an indigo colouring that remains in the dead wood which, oddly, is quite beautiful. Curiston wished to investigate this phenomenon. By using a blue gel cover, the type used in theatre productions, over an LED light, she cast the blue light onto a found piece of pine wood. The result was very unusual, to the point that the viewer was not sure what they were actually looking at, as the indigo stains in the wood, combined with this intense blue light, echoed a human form.
The building of pipelines is also is a very important issue to the people living in the northern part of the province and coastline. In her work Curiston has used pipes in two interesting ways. Within buildings, she has placed wax pipes that give the appearance of travelling from room to room, sometimes being visible outside the skeletal structure of a building. These wax pipes are imbued with fluorescent paint, which, when the overhead lights are turned off, glow. It is an eerie glow, one that references the flow of toxic substances. In another work, Curiston has also used found wood pieces and paired these with an elbow joint of a drainage pipe. This pairing becomes a complicated signifier; the intersection of natural material conjoined with a metal pipe painted with phosphorescent paint articulates the issues of environmental concerns with a simplicity that belies the conceptual complexity of the work.
Curiston has an interest in cosmology and this intersection of the concept of our universe and the commonality of the materials it contains produces some interesting esoteric and poetic works. She has created a “Device for Listening to Snow”, a glorious combination of small ear phones, and a metal oil funnel, displayed on a plinth. It suggests that the silence found in falling snow has a sound, and Curiston has aided us in this endeavor. In another work, she placed a hearing aide into a spiraled seashell, the idea of hearing the ocean underscored with an aid to this hearing. In another work, she has built a wooden step, implying that a person can stand on the step and be one “step” closer to the moon. Curiston also investigates the stars and the sky in a series where she has turned her attention to rocks. She has placed found rocks on plinths to discuss and reveal the aspect of a fallen star. Science has explained that the elements found in the universe of space are the same elements that are on earth. Curiston understands that there is a connection to a rock on earth and a star in space. In another work, she has painted rocks blue and set them into a field in Wells in 2012 to propose the conceptual idea of pieces of fallen sky. The blue of the rocks match the blue of the sky, and the viewer understands the connection of earth and sky, the earth and the universe.
An aspect of Curiston’s practice that I find compelling is her series of works where she paints objects to look like themselves. This concept originated in her university practice where she was interested in “twinned” objects, in her research which involved ideas about the object and its representation. This body of work has involved portraits of people and found objects, such as a length of a tree trunk and a piece of a rusted culvert. In the portrait work, which was exhibited in the galleries in Williams Lake, Penticton and Smithers in 2009, she gathered friends and family members for individual studio sessions. In these sessions, she coated their faces with barrier cream, and then used acrylic washes to paint their “portrait” directly on to their faces. Once painted, the faces of the sitters were photographed. The images are extremely subtle, but visually unusual in a way that is hard to describe. One senses that the faces are altered, but the viewers are given very few visual cues as to how it has been done. In the work involving the objects, Curiston took her investigations out into nature. She used the same painting concept to paint a green elm, a chunk of rusted metal, and a culvert. This was an interesting concept as it effectively effaced any authorship of artistic production. In this era of guarded artistic authorship and societal identity, the subtleties of these works underpin a radical potential for attracting wider audiences that interests Curiston, and as she suggests the best works are the ones that least confirm our expectations as viewers.[15]
Nora Curiston’s work often makes the viewers angry, and the curator of the Penticton Art Gallery was questioned for an hour by a gallery visitor, who had decided that “Structure for Supporting a Narrow Column of Air” was the reason for all that is wrong in our Canadian culture and society, and most importantly, our taxation system. The sculpture is yellow in colour, and looks like a modified lamp stand which is approximately five feet high. The top of the stand has a small circular plate that becomes the supporting structure for the narrow column of air. It was this story that first turned my attention to Curiston’s work. It reminded me of a painting critique when I was an undergrad, where through a heated discussion I suddenly realized that when we stand before a work of art, we often stand there with all of our tightly held prejudices and value judgments, instead of standing there for an open engagement of the proffered ideas. Perhaps, as Rancière suggests, this is a consequence of the passivity of viewing, or as he also writes, perhaps “there is too much pressure placed upon the spectator”.[12]
When viewing the slide of a “Structure for Supporting a Narrow Column of Air”, I was sitting in the gymnasium in the small vibrant community of Wells, BC during the artists’ talk and orientation for the Toni Onley Artist Project. The Toni Onley Artist Project is an annual residency, and part of a much larger summer program, sponsored by Island Mountain Arts that brings together mentors and artists from across North America. Yet this wasn’t really my first introduction to Curiston’s work. “Tied Down Rock” was the first work of hers that I had seen. She had a large rock, approximately six feet by six feet, moved to a location in front of the residence of the Curator of Island Mountain Arts, Julie Fowler, and proceeded to tie it down. It is not easy to tie down a rock; one must dig and prepare holes in the soil surrounding the rock, place rebar and then pour concrete, and finally use airline aviation cable for its tensile strength necessary to keep the rock in place. The work is successful in its ability to engage the viewer, by giving the viewer an unusual idea to respond to, and the title itself provides language clues to give a point of entry with which to understand the sculpture.
Nora Curiston is interested in how a little bit of art influences the viewer, and claimed that she agrees with Herbert Marcuse, who suggests that there is a radical potential in art. For Marcuse, the radical potential of art lies in the location of art as outside of capitalism, outside of the definitions of an art object to be bought and sold, an art that reflected an anti-aesthetic. [13]
Curiston suggests that her philosophy is to engage with ideas “One degree off of their centre.”[14] As an artist, Curiston has created a space for her viewers to enter, gently nudging them out of a passive space. And it is a poetically sublime space, as was evident in the 2009 exhibition at the Penticton Art Gallery. It was titled “Prepared to Receive”, and beside the vinyl letters of the exhibition title signage, was a bent car antenna, forlorn, waiting to receive anything.
Both Curiston and I remember hearing the late Peter Gzowski interviewing Donna Williams, an autistic woman on the CBC radio program “This is Morningside”. As I understood the interview, Williams had acute hypermnesiac synaesthesia, where she could see words as vibrant explosions of colours, and she stated that she and Gzowski were meeting in the colour pink. The ideas in this interview led Curiston on a rich journey of investigations regarding colour and light; could colour have a smell or weight, for example? She explored one aspect of this idea in an exhibition of her work at the Langham Cultural Centre in Kaslo, British Columbia titled “Colour: Light”, in 2010. She experimented with painting areas of a wall and specific lighting, and in the end, painted the whole room, floor, walls, pipes, etc. so that the colour was reflected back onto itself, which resulted in a rich saturation of pink colour contained within the room. The room in question was the washroom of the Cultural Centre, and the serendipity of having a mirror in the coloured room added another dimension to the concept of meeting in the colour pink, with oneself in the mirror. Another colour investigation in this exhibition was titled “3 ½ Pounds of a Colour somewhere between F033 and F037” in which Curiston folded and stacked potato sacks on a plinth. She attached to the plinth colour tags of F033 and F037- the kind of tags one gets as colour swatches at a paint store- which echo the yellow hues of the folded sacks.
Curiston continued her explorations of colour. She explored the “smell” of the colour purple by carefully preparing essential oils that subtly filled a corner of the gallery. She proposed that this olfactory event could describe the colour purple to a viewer. In her other explorations, Curiston built a machine for measuring the temperature of yellow. She was given a painting box, and the accumulated marks on the box reflected this history of painting. She then gathered materials, wires and tubing which she affixed to the box that could then yield information regarding the temperature of yellow. Curiston’s creative practice often highlights her affection for collecting certain found objects.
She used a music box with ballerina figure in her sculpture titled “Dancing in Green Light”, where she proposed in a metaphoric way that it is very difficult to be green. The work features the ballerina figure, dancing in a circular motion in the music box, attached to the wall and lit by a saturated green light. The movement of the figure also produces the movement of the shadow cast by the green light. The work suggests that all of us are faced with the difficulty of correct referencing of our ecological choices. Curiston gives the example of when she was excited to change the light bulbs in her home from the old incandescent bulbs to the newer compact fluorescent bulbs only to find out that these bulbs are difficult to recycle and place mercury in our landfills.
An issue very important to the northern part of the province is the pine beetle infestation and the extent of the destruction this small beetle has caused on the pine tree forests. The eating cycle of the pine beetle results in an indigo colouring that remains in the dead wood which, oddly, is quite beautiful. Curiston wished to investigate this phenomenon. By using a blue gel cover, the type used in theatre productions, over an LED light, she cast the blue light onto a found piece of pine wood. The result was very unusual, to the point that the viewer was not sure what they were actually looking at, as the indigo stains in the wood, combined with this intense blue light, echoed a human form.
The building of pipelines is also is a very important issue to the people living in the northern part of the province and coastline. In her work Curiston has used pipes in two interesting ways. Within buildings, she has placed wax pipes that give the appearance of travelling from room to room, sometimes being visible outside the skeletal structure of a building. These wax pipes are imbued with fluorescent paint, which, when the overhead lights are turned off, glow. It is an eerie glow, one that references the flow of toxic substances. In another work, Curiston has also used found wood pieces and paired these with an elbow joint of a drainage pipe. This pairing becomes a complicated signifier; the intersection of natural material conjoined with a metal pipe painted with phosphorescent paint articulates the issues of environmental concerns with a simplicity that belies the conceptual complexity of the work.
Curiston has an interest in cosmology and this intersection of the concept of our universe and the commonality of the materials it contains produces some interesting esoteric and poetic works. She has created a “Device for Listening to Snow”, a glorious combination of small ear phones, and a metal oil funnel, displayed on a plinth. It suggests that the silence found in falling snow has a sound, and Curiston has aided us in this endeavor. In another work, she placed a hearing aide into a spiraled seashell, the idea of hearing the ocean underscored with an aid to this hearing. In another work, she has built a wooden step, implying that a person can stand on the step and be one “step” closer to the moon. Curiston also investigates the stars and the sky in a series where she has turned her attention to rocks. She has placed found rocks on plinths to discuss and reveal the aspect of a fallen star. Science has explained that the elements found in the universe of space are the same elements that are on earth. Curiston understands that there is a connection to a rock on earth and a star in space. In another work, she has painted rocks blue and set them into a field in Wells in 2012 to propose the conceptual idea of pieces of fallen sky. The blue of the rocks match the blue of the sky, and the viewer understands the connection of earth and sky, the earth and the universe.
An aspect of Curiston’s practice that I find compelling is her series of works where she paints objects to look like themselves. This concept originated in her university practice where she was interested in “twinned” objects, in her research which involved ideas about the object and its representation. This body of work has involved portraits of people and found objects, such as a length of a tree trunk and a piece of a rusted culvert. In the portrait work, which was exhibited in the galleries in Williams Lake, Penticton and Smithers in 2009, she gathered friends and family members for individual studio sessions. In these sessions, she coated their faces with barrier cream, and then used acrylic washes to paint their “portrait” directly on to their faces. Once painted, the faces of the sitters were photographed. The images are extremely subtle, but visually unusual in a way that is hard to describe. One senses that the faces are altered, but the viewers are given very few visual cues as to how it has been done. In the work involving the objects, Curiston took her investigations out into nature. She used the same painting concept to paint a green elm, a chunk of rusted metal, and a culvert. This was an interesting concept as it effectively effaced any authorship of artistic production. In this era of guarded artistic authorship and societal identity, the subtleties of these works underpin a radical potential for attracting wider audiences that interests Curiston, and as she suggests the best works are the ones that least confirm our expectations as viewers.[15]