The Last Place on Earth / The Edge of All Things by Nikolai Noel

Medulla Art Gallery is pleased to invite you to

THE LAST PLACE ON EARTH / THE EDGE OF ALL THINGS
BY NIKOLAI NOEL

Opening Reception: Thursday 22nd November, 2018
Time: 7pm - 9pm
Address: #37 Fitt Street, Woodbrook, Port of Spain.
Contact: 1(868)6801041, 1(868)622 1196 or [email protected]
Closing date: Thursday 10th January, 2019
Gallery hours: Mon-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat 11am-2pm.

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC - FREE ADMISSION

ABOUT THE SHOW: ARTIST’S STATEMENT

The Mysteries of the false cardinal: The last place on earth, The edge of all things (to/ward Undiscovery)

Of loops – coils – knots.

My mind folds in on itself again and again as I despair – as the present folds in on the past as it despairs, or the past on the present in despair - as the black sky folds the black ocean – as they both – repeated - look into the other(’s voids) - for the substance of answers/the answers to their own substances – and as they fold and fold and follow one another into unfathomable multiplying blacknesses and into wisdoms outside of reason - I am turned – and coiled – cinched – again.

The last place on earth/The edge of all things will be my first solo show in close to a decade. In 2009 I showed 124 drawings at Alice Yard from two bodies of work I titled Dimming I & II. That work was about masculinity and modernity, mortality, fear. The fragility of our bodies our politics and our territories, about how delicate we all are and how easily undone. It was also about magic and mystery and death and mark making, geometry, sex, love, blindness, nostalgia and regret. It was about traveling through this life in this skin and the politics of that work. It was about making 124 drawings, and it was about making 124 drawings darker.

In 2011 I began drawing sea monsters because I was becoming increasingly suspicious of my facility for rendering human figures, and that those monsters were inelegant and sometimes just goofy (all the things that my figures were not becoming). Sea monsters hung out at the edges of maps, or in vast unexplored bodies of water where no one knew what was going on “hic sunt dracones” - here be dragons, as inscribed on the Hunt–Lenox Globe – peril awaits! These monsters were also attractive to me because they allowed me to imagine how a kind of dimness of sight and an acute amnesia augmented by fear, can transform a whale or a walrus into a deadly threatening man and vessel consuming monster. How the mechanics of that conversion could allow me to think about attitudes/responses toward what was/is unknown. How these creatures became so wondrous and fantastic and formidable in the imaginations of sailors and chart makers and how again, these beasts were very explicitly meant to be feared, avoided and opposed. One could not befriend/enlist a creature so strange and alien and unknowable. It could be said that these invented beasts on maps became sites/repositories to locate/posit some portion of an irrational fear conjured by the unknown.

In 2012 I was finishing up graduate school in Virginia when seventeen year old Trayvon Martin was stalked, shot and killed in Florida. The following year his shooter was found not guilty by a Florida jury on the charge of second degree murder.

In 2014, twelve year old Tamir Rice was shot and killed by law enforcement personnel in Ohio. Eighteen year old Darren Brown was shot and killed by law enforcement personnel in Missouri.

In 2016 thirty seven year old Alton Sterling was shot and killed by law enforcement personnel in Louisiana. Thirty two year old Philando Castile was shot and killed while seated in his vehicle in the presence of the two other occupants of that vehicle, one a young child, by law enforcement personnel in Minnesota. That killing was streamed live on social media by an occupant of the vehicle.

These events occupied my thinking and entered the work. The monsters I drew (always stand ins for the bodies of people of colour negotiating with/presenting to a disinterested sometimes adversarial West/New World; as dark, mysterious, mythical and threatening) found echoes in the images of black bodies slumped, lying in the street, under guard in death. The implied motion in the renderings of sea monsters, partially emerging and partially sinking from/to the uncharted deep met terrible contrast in the alien stillness’s of the bodies in the images generated + disseminated in the wake of these killings.

As these drawings developed additional dimensions for me in my studio, I struggled and continue to struggle with my relationship/proximity/permission to the grief, distress and confusion that these events cause me. I agonize that the stories of these men and women and boys will continue (for people like me, the living) without them. And I worry about my distance and my hurt equally.

For this show I have made drawings in a way - to deliberately complicate their re-presentation, drawings that can be difficult to see/recognize – they become different things at each remove. These drawings lurk, their shape and substance obscured, they obfuscate themselves and evade – they are in some ways unsatisfactory and even impenetrable (though this text offers an entry point). For me these works function as allegory in a way that allows me to think about the lives we live, the world we face and the way the world may face us. I may try to give a form to a formless, frightening thing in the world, just so I can talk to it/about it. Then I may make a corpse of it and give it seven names to see if that would reduce its terror and make it mute. But that is just one of the games.

In 2009, with Dimming I & II (and then, before that), I have mourned in/through my work. The last place on earth is no different.

Nikolai Mahesh Noel 2018

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Nikolai M Noel (b. 1976, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago) received a BA from the Universityof the West Indies in Trinidad in 2009 and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in Virginia in 2012. His works have been shown at the Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA, Maine, USA; Caribbean Contemporary Arts 7, Alice Yard, Medulla Art Gallery, Trinidad Art Society and the National Museum and Art Gallery, Port of Spain, Trinidad. Noel is involved in an ongoing web-based, epistolary and occasionally material collaboration with Matthew P Shelton, their work centres on their concerns with colonialism, history, subjectivity, memory and distance. Noel is a founding member of SYoS (See You onSundays), an artist collective and critical theory reading group committed to arts education in Trinidad and Tobago. SYoS is a modest initiative inspired by other experimental free public pedagogical engagements around the world dedicated to exploring and enacting new methodologies for social learning/education and sharing.

Image: Still of Marker 01 - A/The great serpent/A beginning and an end as an end and a beginning, (2018) Projection (animation) (Dimensions variable)