Brookhaven College Center For the Arts

 

Studio Gallery

 

January 14—February 13, 2002

 

 

Mary Nicolett

Drought, 2002

 

 

 

Drought, 2002: An Installation

by Mary Nicolett

 

Curator’s Essay

David Newman

Gallery director

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Colours so ordinary, so smoothly natural and cultural, servants of the gaze buzy getting its bearings in its field and enjoying it: here they are banished by the eye that is about to paint and is plunged into the darkness of its doubt.

 

Jean-François Lyotard[1]

 

 

 

 

Drought 2002, a site-specific installation by Mary Nicolett for the Studio Gallery at Brookhaven College, covers the south wall of the gallery with panty hose stretched over wire bent into leg forms. That is an accurate but inadequate description. It is an inadequate description insofar as it engages, in the most cursory way, the material cause of the objectness of the work, but not the artwork qua work. The objectness of the work, and of its material cause, are hardly without relevance to the reception of the artwork qua artwork. Indeed, they are crucial to the reception of the artwork, precisely in that part of the content of the work consists in the tension between the materiality of the object and and the reception of the work in its perceptual presentation.

                  What one perceives is a space opened on the wall. The tans and taupes, beiges and browns of the fabric,  emerging off the wall like overlapping clumps of dry tall grasses in a field,  evoke a landscape space. That is not to say that one does not see a wall covered with pantyhose. Of course one sees a wall covered with pantyhose, and sees a wall covered with pantyhose as such. But one also perceives a field, filled as with dried foliage. These two aspects of seeing the wall covered with pantyhose is the twofoldness of seeing-in. While these two aspects can be distinguished, they are not seperable, for each entails the other in the perception of differentiated surfaces. While each aspect can be described as if it were a separate experience, it is more useful and accurate to regard the two aspects of the experience of seeing-in as being equiprimordial. The phenomenological feature Richard Wollheim terms twofoldness is this equiprimordial apprehension of the surface as material and surface as spatial opening.[2]

                  One may of course privilege on aspect of seeing-in over the other, favoring either surface as material or surface as spatial opening. One may shift from one to the other. And one may have difficulty in moving from one to the other: the difficulty is perhaps at a maximum when one is confronted with an artwork the material cause of which violates one’s expectation of the extension of the category ‘art material’. The difficulty is componded if the object is highly cathected, as pantyhose are.[3] If the unusual nature of the material cause of the work causes difficulty, that very difficulty adds to the power of the effect of seeing-in once the transition from the aspect of  material to the aspect of spatial opening is made.

Once the effect of seeing-in obtains, once one apprehends the surface as spatial opening, the matter shifts to the inflection of one’s perception of the space that opens. Drought, 2002 occupies a wall fourteen feet high and eleven feet wide. In the relatively small area of the the studio Gallery, confronting work of this size extending well above eye level in the subdued lighting of the gallery and with the work itself strongly lit, one is acutely aware of the scale of the work. The effect of being dwarfed by a large object is the experience of the sublime.[4]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Biographical Note

 

Dallas artist Mary Nicolett received the Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of North Texas. Recent exhibitions include The Lady is A Tramp, 500X, Dallas, concurrent with this installation; DFW in Black, White & Gray, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, 2001; Mary Nicolett, Luke Sides, Charlotte Smith: New Works, 500X, 2001; Curv. Good/Bad Art Collective, Denton, 2000; Nice Ass—Recent Works by Jo Ann Durham, Mary Nicolett and Derrick Saunders, 500X, 2000; Itchy, University of Texas at Dallas, 1999; XXL, Richland College, 1999.

 

 

 

 

Endnotes