State Of Emergency

Artist: Kika Thorne (Victoria, Vancouver) 

Date: April 11 to May 2, 1997 

Artist Talk: April 12

Kika Thorne’s installation, State of Emergency, was an astonishing balancing act: it hovered in both physical and interpretive spaces and suggested the delicacies of negotiating the impending crisis of global warming.

Global warming (a.k.a. anthropogenic climate change) has been a contested topic for decades. Suddenly, during a winter of turbulent weather, climate change and its economic and political fallout has become news, as the biosphere appears to have reached, or perhaps exceeded, the tipping point.

Kika Thorne used simple materials, available at any hardware store, to create State of Emergency. The centre of the installation took the form of an icosahedron [ahy-koh-suh-hee-druhn], a 20-faceted platonic solid that signified water. It was comprised of triangles made of blue tarp, held in tension by fluorescent orange surveyor twine. The twine was fixed to the architecture of Open Space with rare earth magnets. Sixty points of contact—on the floor, the walls and the ceiling—kept the form floating in the middle of the room. The individual facets came together to produce a single form—the result of delicate “negotiations”. One line could not be too long, or too tight, too short or too loose. Too much tension would have thrown everything out of whack. Each line was necessary to keep the whole project intact.