Nic Wilson

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Nic Wilson, “A Dying Hare” (video still), 2016-2020

single-channel video,  7:00:46 hours (courtesy the artist)

Nic Wilson, in a short text presented as part of the solo exhibition, A Dying Hare, at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, touches on the ritual significance of double-wick candles, German artist Gerhard Richter’s candle paintings, a Han Dynasty general and candles made from elder branches. This poetic meditation, an excerpt from the Regina artist’s book, What I Saw, not only serves as an apt lead-in to the show’s three videos, but also signals an ability to weave together disparate allusions into surprising wholes.

One video, Not Long Now, features letter-shaped candles set against a seamless white background. The letters, typically used on birthday cakes, spell out the work’s title. A hand holding a lighter enters the frame and lights each candle. A nearly identical format is used in Untitled (Nic Wilson). Here the letters spell the artist’s name, bookended by tiny rainbow candles.

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Nic Wilson, “Not Long Now” (video still), 2016

single-channel video, 7:41 min. (courtesy the artist)

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Nic Wilson, “Untitled (Nic Wilson)” (video still), 2013

single-channel video, 9:30 min. (courtesy the artist)

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The length of the videos – roughly eight or nine minutes – is determined by the candles themselves: the videos end when the candles have burned themselves out. The drama is subtle but oddly compelling and it’s easy to become engrossed. Some letters dissolve while others evaporate. Transmutation occurs as the wax drips, comingles with neighboring colours and pools. Some candles melt entirely while others gutter only half consumed. Occasionally, a satisfying puff of smoke marks a candle’s demise.

The final frames of both videos present a new, if indecipherable, text of transfigured letters, a fitting commentary on the profound uncertainty as we enter our third pandemic year. It’s difficult to avoid the parallels to our draining energy, even our mortality. This is especially true of Untitled (Nic Wilson), where we may imagine our own name, or the name of a loved one, vanishing.

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Nic Wilson, “A Dying Hare” (video still), 2016-2020

single-channel video,  7:00:46 hours (courtesy the artist)

Wilson’s third video, A Dying Hare, clocks in at seven hours and is composed of six segments. Each segment features different candles that, again, are lit by a disembodied hand and allowed to burn themselves out. There are several arrangements of floral candles, an Easter rabbit, a stuffed olive and a skull. Each is set against a different pastel-coloured background. The segments vary in length from six minutes to more than two hours, depending on the duration of the burn. The floral candles, for example, combust almost instantly, shedding copious wax tears. The Easter rabbit, immediately compelling, as anthropomorphized animals often are, is slowly beheaded. The skull performs a neat reversal: initially humorous in its dollar-store banality, it becomes more gripping as its eye sockets leak wax and other features disintegrate.

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Nic Wilson, “A Dying Hare” (video still), 2016-2020

single-channel video, 7:00:46 hours  (courtesy the artist)

A Dying Hare, Wilson says, was inspired by a 1703 painting, Still Life with Dead Hare, by Jan Weenix, a Dutch painter remembered for his skilful handling of fur, feathers and claws. Each candle clearly alludes to the trope of the memento mori, that stern reminder of the inevitability of death. However, as the show’s curator Troy Gronsdahl points out, the project also yields a bevy of “idiosyncratic connections,” including fireplace channels, scrying (the use of second sight), and Structuralist film, an experimental movement in the 1960s marked by simplified formal elements, as well as various still life paintings.

The exhibition, which continues to March 6, is curiously diffuse with each video screened on an existing bank of four adjacent information monitors near the elevators on different floors of the Remai Modern. Only one of the four monitors presents Wilson’s videos – the remaining three continue to flash messaging about exhibitions and the gift shop. This is distracting. The subtleties of Wilson’s work are better appreciated on Vimeo.

Wilson’s videos, as with his work in other media, which includes a forthcoming public performance at the Remai and a new artist book, are a rhizomatic meandering through a forest of ideas. “I’m interested in practices that seek to intuit something about the self, about the world that is beyond a certain type of reason,” Wilson says.

This series of videos adeptly conjures the unease of the present moment – the quiet anxiety no amount of philosophical analysis or talk therapy can quite unravel. It’s like the dissonance and disquiet one experiences while cooking a nice supper and chatting with a beloved grandparent, even as the unrelenting horrors of climate change, the pandemic and late capitalism unfold outside the kitchen window. ■  

Nic Wilson, A Dying Hare, at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon from Dec. 22, 2021, to March 6, 2022.

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