Kathy Slade
Reading the rock that changed Nietzsche’s life.
Kathy Slade, “Sinking in the West,” 2022
installation view at Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (photo by Rachel Topham Photography, courtesy CAG)
In 1881, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche went for a walk by Lake Silvaplana in Switzerland. He encountered a “mighty pyramidal block of stone” that inspired the idea of “eternal recurrence,” a core concept in existential philosophy that refers to the “unconditional and infinitely repeated circulation of all things.” It changed his life.
Longtime Vancouver artist Kathy Slade restages this pivotal meeting in four different ways in her solo exhibition, As the sun disappears and the shadows descend from the mountaintop, on view until May 7 at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. While conceptual, her work is tactile and textural, taking cues from literature and divination to shift perception.
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Kathy Slade, “Sinking in the West,” 2022
detail of installation at Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (photo by Rachel Topham Photography, courtesy CAG)
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Kathy Slade, “Sinking in the West,” 2022
detail of installation at Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (photo by Rachel Topham Photography, courtesy CAG)
Sinking in the West is an enormous hanging tapestry that replicates the Nietzsche rock at scale. My first instinct is to back up and find a spot to take it all in. From a distance, it looks like a matte inkjet photograph. Up close, the hatch of the weave becomes visible. The interlocking coloured threads recall pixels on a digital screen. It’s somehow comforting to study a swatch and then step back to consider how it fits into the whole, like a close reading, where a scholar might relate a single word to the rest of a passage or even larger themes. The work also recalls Italian conceptual artist Alighiero Boetti’s embroidered world maps, which Slade has acknowledged as an influence, particularly for her 2018 exhibition at the Surrey Art Gallery, This is a chord. This is another.
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Kathy Slade, “Scrying Mirror,” 2022
installation view at Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (photo by Rachel Topham Photography, courtesy CAG)
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Kathy Slade, “Scrying Mirror,” 2022
installation view at Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (photo by Rachel Topham Photography, courtesy CAG)
On the wall opposite the tapestry is Scrying Mirror, a thick round slab of polished obsidian, a naturally occurring volcanic glass. In the 16th century, obsidian was used as a “spirit mirror” for divination. Two centuries later, the Claude glass, which harkens to obsidian mirrors, but was generally made of slightly convex glass and a silver mirror backing, helped painters reduce and simplify colour and tonal ranges when painting. By turning away from a landscape, an artist could glimpse the framed scene in the mirror. Slade’s staging similarly invites viewers to study the glossy, warped reflection of the tapestry in her obsidian mirror.
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Kathy Slade, “Loneliest Loneliness,” 2023
installation view at Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (photo by Rachel Topham Photography, courtesy CAG)
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Kathy Slade, “As the sun disappears and the shadows descend from the mountaintop,” 2023
detail of installation at Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (photo by Rachel Topham Photography, courtesy CAG)
On a plinth beside the mirror is an artist book by Slade and photographer Alejo Duque, who accompanied her on a research trip last year to the Swiss Alps. The title, Loneliest Loneliness, is borrowed from Nietzsche’s explanation of eternal recurrence in his 1882 book, The Gay Science:
“What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sight […] will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence’ […] The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, a speck of dust!”
Slade’s book offers a “fate and destiny spell” along with photographs of charcoal rubbings of the Nietzsche stone’s surface.
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Kathy Slade, “The Heaviest Weight,” 2022
detail of installation at Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (photo by Rachel Topham Photography, courtesy CAG)
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Kathy Slade, “The Heaviest Weight,” 2022
installation view at Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (photo by Rachel Topham Photography, courtesy CAG)
In the adjacent gallery, The Heaviest Weight, a series of 20 large graphite rubbings, maps the rock’s entire surface. Frottage creates seemingly infinite variations, so the work almost becomes a script that reveals patterns to attentive viewers. The intricate textures are imposing, either because of my claustrophobia (I had to leave and return later with the help of some mild cannabis) or their repetitive quality.
An encounter with a mountain (even a small one) can be a reckoning with deep time, life and death, as it was for Nietzsche. Slade’s experimentation with perspective and scale reminds us that while we sometimes cannot see our lives clearly, we can change our ways of looking. Through weaving, scrying, rubbings and spells, Slade ultimately captures the simultaneous sense of entrapment and freedom that comprises “eternal recurrence.” ■
Kathy Slade: As the sun disappears and the shadows descend from the mountaintop at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver from Jan. 27 to May 7, 2023.
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