The sixteen works in Isabel Nolan’s solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery come across like a group show. Titled The weakened eye of day, it mines the poetry of geological time, citing Greek mythology, astronomy, the cultural signification of donkeys, and abstract painting. A number of framed texts explicate the myth of Icarus and Daedalus. These passages call into consideration the pursuit of taming or defying nature. They form a kind of lasso that holds the metaphors and research together. This story of the man whose son falls to Earth demarcates the field of Nolan’s inquiry into the sustained tension between limitless heavens and the mundane terrestrial realm.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Isabel Nolan
Rock founded the place is a scroll of text written by Nolan that hangs on the farthest wall when you enter the gallery space. It could be seen as a starting point, though the exhibition doesn’t demand a linear reading. It begins, “Four thousand, two hundred and eighty million years ago or so the sun shone on no fixed thing” and proceeds like a science lesson given as a creation story. The plot is Earth; the protagonist is Rock. “Rock is hard. Rock has done time. Compared to Rock most minerals seem frivolous.” By the time Sun has entered the story, the scroll has reached the floor and the next sentence can only be seen peeking out beneath the roll gathered at the bottom. This moment indicates an unknowable ending. However, the intrigue is balked by a number of paintings dispersed around the gallery that have a somewhat tepid presence. I can’t tell if they are footnotes, surfaces that the more distinct ideas can fall into, or studies that led to the resonating meanings floating between the works.
Two groupings of concentric spheres are strewn in this space and in the next. Their shapes recall the layers of the Earth, but their chalky and uniform surfaces evokes the anatomy of a jawbreaker or an unfinished teaching prop. This banal tangent finds its accompaniment in a sculpture of a lemon yellow stage prop of a lion with a gold spike piercing its raised paw. I chuckled at the total estrangement between it and the object behind it: an austere steel construction of an imagined map of a galaxy and a constellation titled Somewhere between Andromeda and Vulpecula: Sky Atlas.
Nolan seems determined to explore everything pertaining to and beneath the cosmos, yet she never strives to be all encompassing or epic about it. Her modest works might seem frivolous, but they lead her audience to find connections in an extensive visual lexicon.
Contemporary Art Gallery: http://www.contemporaryartgallery.ca/
Isabel Nolan: The weakened eye of day continues until October 2.
Steffanie Ling's essays, criticism, and art writing have been published alongside exhibitions, in print, and online in Canada and the United States. She is the editor of Bartleby Review, an occasional pamphlet of criticism and writing in Vancouver, and a curator at CSA Space. She is Akimblog’s Vancouver correspondent and can be followed on Twitter and Instagram @steffbao.
↧
Isabel Nolan at the Contemporary Art Gallery
↧
