LUNCHBOX REMAINS

CRITICAL REVIEW BY DONALD BRACKETT FOR CJRT 91.1 FM “ON THE ARTS” 

Over the years, I’ve noticed that most artists I’ve encountered have a conscience of some kind, a special conscience, apolitical conscience, guilty conscience quiet often. But none of them really put it up front totally in their work- they don’t put their conscience literally right into the work and say: “This is what’s irritating me, this is what’s bugging me.”

Nikola Nikola has an installation at the 80 Spadina building at Rose Rongits Contemporary Art-it’s on the third floor, at #313-and he does have concern about-in the past, he’s been a painter, and he’s had concerns about pollution and industrial corporate structures I suppose, and the influence they have on our lives, and it’s always been very upfront-he’s been an expressionist, very aggressive painter-large kind of bold, occasionally violent subject matter. I’ve noticed over the years, in couple shows, and we’ve talked about him maybe in the past couple years, works becoming much more sculptural, his paintings actually sprouting appendages and structures, assemblages essentially, from the real world-very physical. And I could see then that he was gravitating, evolving towards sculpture. And sure enough, this show is almost exclusively sculpture, although he seems to operate in a realm between painting and sculpture, makes assemblages that have components that go together.

There’s something theatrical about the way he sets the stage fort what he wants to say. Now, there’s an interesting ad that he had – I think that was recently in C Magazine- and it shows him- no artwork- but in a forest field about to hack apart a gigantic tree that’s been felled-he’s busy up there and there and this relates to his personal life – he lives and works part of the year somewhere near Algonquin Park, and he has a love of trees, a fondness for (the) nature that surrounds him up there, and he’s bugged because the logging industry frequently concerns itself with short term goals.

He uses wood in this installation of sculptures, and it’s intriguing – he doesn’t focus on any particular material – he’s more like a conceptual artist who says: “What do I want to say this time?” In other words, what’s irritating me, what do people need to hear? – very passionate, therefore. He then chooses whatever the vehicle happens to be, and in this case, it’s wood. He doesn’t cut wood down, of course, which would be counter to his notion of the logging industry’s too much cutting down – he finds dead trees, and this entire exhibition, which has about six major carved pieces – which is unusual in itself, that someone is using wood in 1996 as a material, carved and smoothly hewn wood – they’re all taken form one tree. So there’s a kind of philosophical base to what he’s doing, using one tree and forming, or releasing the shapes in the old sort of Michaelangelo sense where he thought his people were in the granite and he was releasing them.

Now what Nikola Nikola releases from the wood are organic shapes which are strangely disturbing, and we don’t quiet know why. They appear literally to be organs, in some cases, but they are more like from our unconscious, they’re shapes that emerge and appear to be under water with floating tendrils. The beauty of them is the way they’ve been carved, polished, and occasionally polychromed. He also uses resins, fiberglass, he’s got an incredible array of materials actually – wood, metal, silk, cotton, skins, rust, vinyl, and felt.

And some of his interesting pieces still have painting elements attached to them. There is one called “Fallen Curtain”, for instance, which has a huge sheet of vinyl, it’s almost like an envelope which you can see through, and black pigment, a charred sort of black ink is on the inside, making all kinds of unusual what we call ‘chance operations’ images to emerge. He has a stretched deerskin with some pigment on it on another wall, and there’s something about the skin that harkens back to the original source of painting which is usually on animal hides in prehistoric time, so he’s drawing references to something very primitive and archaic in our culture, which is kind of hidden inside the modern world. So he seems to be a person who’s trapped in the 20th century and doesn’t much like industrialization that’s gone on, and you know, who can blame him – our huge old growth forests are being taken away, and that kind of thing. He addresses this in a very direct, visceral way. In another piece, called ‘Lost Virginity’ that I am quite fond of, he uses industrial felt. The pieces that have two-dimensional fine art visual painting references are the ones that I think are most successful, because we have the vinyl sheet, the deerskin, and the felt which has been painted on in a very aggressive way. These however, are complemented by these rough-hewn wooden objects, which seem to be bobbing up out of our subconscious minds. They’re very unsettling, and we don’t quite know why.

 There is an unsettling piece that …. is a combination of wooden object and a plexiglass piece which has actual weasel skin that have been pressed in. Now on the weasel skins he’s got little sale tags, and this is called ‘Short Term Pleasure Seeker’, and I think it kind of sums up the way he views the industrial world. And again he is, I would say, a political activist kind of artist in a sense, but he doesn’t risk the disaster of making the work just a political commentary, which I think can be too dry, obviously, occasionally you’re looking at something and you feel you’re hearing a kind of sociological lesson. In this case, though, they’re very sensual and strangely elegant, definitely unsettling but they have this important point to make about living in conjunction with nature.