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Siren IV – nichola feldman-kiss
2022-05-28 @ 2:30 pm - 2022-06-23 @ 5:00 pm
nichola feldman-kiss is a Toronto based artist creating across disciplines with emphasis on performance, lens and hybrid media technologies presented as activism, institutional intervention and public installation. feldman-kiss’s process rich research proposes identity as a fugitive concept while focussing on the body as a contested site of cultural production. The artist’s 25 year oeuvre is an ongoing critique of the Colonial paradigm. Their installations – pristine as laboratory craft – ask us to reconsider difficult questions about what it means to be conscious social bodies within the contemporary moment.
Statement
Siren is inspired by reflection on the millennia of oceanic passages that swallow lives as we move about in flight, in hope, in adventure and in servitude –taking and being taken, willfully and unwillingly peopling the planet. I directed an under iceberg shoot from my downtown Toronto studio during the first covid lockdown of spring 2020. It was remarkable how we waited and waited to get out onto the water and under the sea ice. Then suddenly we were permitted and gov.nl said “Yes, come. Do your shoot.” But the iceberg was just a chip, run aground, rapidly breaking up, melting in the late June sun. The crew went out. I stayed. It was a remote shoot. I am unstoppably awed by my iceberg captured for screen. Siren lV is a study in digital 3D, printed into silk. How I still pine for an embodied experience in the face of the fragile and finite majesty that is the earth’s ice. Siren is about urgency. The artwork has been my covid muse, my sanity, my obsession. How abstract it is that I make this work of call to the frigid ocean without ever having laid eyes upon the sea ice. How Nature’s fractals are replicated through scale and through topographies more and less solid, stable, fluid and fleeting. How the iceberg belly is sensual, swollen, ripe, full and undulating as tissue of a soft inner body.