Art Writing — Kyra Kordoski

Selected Art Writing

Slow Enough to Watch the Ptarmigan Eating Willow Buds on Tundra: A Conversation with Maureen Gruben
C Magazine, Issue 150, Maps, Winter 2022

It has been by far the richest art-writing experience of my life to write not about someone, but with them, particularly over this long period of time. Much of Maureen’s practice is derived from attentiveness to the unpredictable encounters with diverse materials that occur throughout the course of her days. This disparate matter often becomes the physical basis of her works, in striking and uninhibited combinations. The result is a material intelligence that enriches theoretical discourses without becoming subsumed in them; that offers an embedded index of place while holding expansive potential for personal resonance. The following is a collaboratively edited text based on our conversations.

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Spin into Being: The Art of Melati Suryodarmo
White Fungus, 2021

Melati Suryodarmo’s performances often seem to exist in a temporal space distinct from daily life. Many of her best-known durational pieces offer an unhurried, inexorably unfolding experience of the impact that energy has on matter and vice versa. In “I’m a Ghost in My Own House” (2012) mounds of coal are reduced to dust throughout the course of a day; in “I Love You” (2007), a giant pane of tempered glass moves slowly, for hours, around an illuminated gallery room; in “Transaction of Hollows” (2016), 800 arrows are shot calmly but with thunderous impact into drywall, one unceasingly after another. In all these cases and dozens of others throughout her prolific 30-year practice, the source of energy that shifts and resists various materials is Suryodarmo’s body.

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The Generosity of Translucence: An essay for QULLIQ, an exhibition by Maureen Gruben
QULLIQ, Emily Carr University Press, Vancouver 2020

Qulliqs are Inuit oil lamps comprised of stone, plant matter and animal fat. Historically, they sustained life and community by bringing small but vital flares of warmth and light into the darkest months. Light has a particular intensity in the Arctic, not only in its immense fluctuations between weeks of constant presence and weeks of total absence, but also in its interactions with ice, its reflections and refractions: the force of sunlit snow so bright it can damage corneas; ever-changing gradations of frozen ocean from deep, muted greys to rich blues shot through with cracks; the radiant marks of machines and tools coloured with industrial neons that are dispersed throughout Arctic towns. There is a vitality to materials that interact with light, and there is a generosity to translucence. Allowing light to pass through necessarily reveals something internal.

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Jessie Ray Short and Dominic Lafontaine, Neither One Nor the Other / Ni l'un, ni l'autre...
White Fungus, 2019

Neither One Nor the Other / Ni l'un, ni l'autre… is an immersive environment excited by presence. Initially developed at the 2018 Déranger creative lab—a National Film Board of Canada French Program initiative for Inuit, Métis and First Nations artists—Jessie Ray Short and Dominic Lafontaine’s symmetrical installation is comprised of two old Sony handy cams, two projectors, and a large, suspended sheet of a reflective polyester film called Mylar. The handy cams are set up to film the mylar continuously; these recordings are projected in real-time directly back onto the mirror-like surface that is being filmed. This creates a chaotic, illuminated feedback loop that is reflected dramatically out onto the walls of the otherwise darkened space. Mylar is so thin that it, and so the reflections it generates, tremble with the smallest atmospheric vibrations....

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Point of Contact: On Place and the West Coast Imaginary, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria
esse arts + opinions, Numéro 93, printemps 2018, p. 104–105

Point of Contact, curated by Haema Sivanesan, addresses the concept of a geographic imaginary through a place now known, due to a misinterpretation by the eighteenth-century Briton, Captain Cook, as Nootka. This region, within the traditional territories of the Nuu-chah-nulth Nations on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, was one of the earliest sites of sustained contact between Europeans and Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. In this exhibition, according to the gallery didactics, it is taken, “as a case study to consider how artists have contributed to shaping the idea of place on the West Coast.” The works that have been selected adhere to a basic curatorial division: they are either by non-Indigenous artists who have depicted this place, or by Nuu-chah-nulth artists for whom this place is an ancestral territory.

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Interview with Curtis Running Rabbit-Lefthand
Musicworks, Spring 2020, issue #136

Blackfoot Confederacy member Curtis Running Rabbit-Lefthand is the founder and executive artistic director of Indigenous Resilience in Music (IRIM), a collective that supports Indigenous musicians and youth in their learning, performing, recording, and collaborating. The group’s Indigenous-led workshops and events address topics ranging from spiritual values and language reclamation to the basic practicalities of how the music industry currently operates... A dedicated musician in his own right, Lefthand fronts the hardcore punk band Signatory. In February 2020, he played a solo set at Open Space gallery in Lekwungen territories (Victoria, British Columbia) with a guitar and small collection of effects pedals. The performance was a response to When Raven Became Spider, a critically acclaimed exhibition that presents comics and graphic novels as sites of reemergence for ancient Indigenous stories and heroes—a theme that connects intimately to Lefthand’s multifaceted commitment to cultural endurance.

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Myfanwy MacLeod: Tell Her Nothing She Tells All Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver
C Magazine, Issue 126, Predecessors Summer 2015

The Age of Aquarius is the latest target of Vancouverbased artist Myfanwy MacLeod’s boisterous yet intellectually demanding satire. While rooted in the eclecticism of the ’70s New Age movement, her exhibition at Catriona Jeffries connects readily with the contemporary. Its title, Tell Her Nothing She Tells All – and the fact that the press release consists only of her artist bio – touches on the show’s internal tensions around access and knowledge. Its individual components are minimal in number but range from the glaringly explicit to the decidedly murky in their referents. The darkened gallery space holds a trio of neon signs that clearly indicate palm reading, chakras and the illuminati. Two plinths each bear a smallish, biomorphic sculpture made of some mysterious composite substance flecked with bright colours.

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Consciousness, a performance lecture by Marcus du Sautoy featuring music by James Holden and visuals by one of us at the Barbican.
BOMB Magazie, March 27, 2013

The evening began with Professor du Sautoy and a brain. The extracted brain, he explained, had been donated to science by an elderly woman who had recently passed away. It didn’t do much, just sat there inert on a steel tray. But its inability to do anything remotely interesting underscored the question around which the evening revolved, a problem that has baffled humans for ages: How do you get from a grayish-pink blob of matter to you? With the help of guest speakers, du Sautoy presented an historical overview of research methods and theories about the brain. We’ve been stumped for so long because a brain’s mechanics can’t be accessed by our traditional method of figuring out how things work, i.e., slicing and dicing. It doesn't take much slicing before the things a curious scientist might be looking for—thoughts, feelings, memories—are gone for good. General understanding has, of course, gradually deepened over the years, but very recent technologies are set to revolutionize our perspectives. In the essay he wrote for the event program, du Sautoy claims: "We stand at a junction not dissimilar to the moment the telescope provided a way for the likes of Galileo to probe the outer reaches of the solar system or the microscope gave Robert Hooke the tool to see the cellular structure of a plant.

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