Kika Thorne - State Of Emergency
State Of Emergency
Opening Wednesday April 11 at 8pm
Kika Thorne’s new installation, State of Emergency, is an astonishing balancing act. It hovers in both physical and interpretive spaces, suggesting 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 uses simple materials, available at any hardware store, to create State of Emergency. The centre of the installation takes the form of an icosahedron [ahy-koh-suh-hee-druhn], a 20-faceted platonic solid that signifies water. It is comprised of triangles made of blue tarp, held in tension by fluorescent orange surveyor twine. The twine is fixed to the architecture of Open Space with rare earth magnets. 60 points of contact—on the floor, the walls and the ceiling—keep the form floating in the middle of the room. That the individual facets come together to produce a single form is the result of delicate “negotiations”. One line cannot be too long, or too tight, too short or too loose. Too much tension throws everything out of whack. Each line is necessary to keep the whole project intact.