First Newsletter: Upcoming Show, Review, and e-flux Reader
A belated happy Halloween to you all! Welcome to my first newsletter, which was delayed, because I don’t consider myself a “content creator”, at least at this time. If anyone remembers, I initially intended to publish this newsletter through TinyLetter, but since that platform will be fazed out (or rather is already) by MailChimp, I’ve moved it to Substack.
There are a number of exciting things going on that I’d like to keep everyone updated about.
To start with, I have a solo exhibition of drawings coming up on Nov. 13th at 482 Gallery in Brooklyn (see below for the PR). It’s curated by my friend Bat-Ami Rivlin, who has done a wonderful job putting it all together. This exhibition is the culmination of some work I’ve been doing over the past two to three years in ink and silverpoint on different sorts of paper that explores how archaic imagery might convey a sense of mystery and omen, while remaining at odds with meaning making as such. In a lot of ways it’s the continuation of an older project, but I think a more dynamic version due to material compromises I’ve made in response to changed circumstances (you know which ones I mean).
Then, I recently published a review of an exhibition of paintings by Kon Trubkovich at Gagosian in the October issue of the Brooklyn Rail. It’s pretty short, but I had a lot of fun writing it, because I was able to hold a critical stance toward the work (which doesn’t happen much in contemporary art writing), and because I got a chance to learn about the Ukrainian parliament by watching videos of judicial violence. There is a second review of the same show in this issue by art historian David Carrier, so by all means I encourage you to read that one as well–– I’d love to know what you think, about how they compare, diverge, and so on.
Finally, in other news, I compiled an e-flux journal reader on the theme of “Untimeliness”, in case any of you read e-flux (I certainly have a hate/love relationship with it). The reader comes with a brief, and dramatic, introduction that had no editorial oversight whatsoever. If you’re not familiar with them, an e-flux reader is a compilation of articles drawn from e-flux journal’s online archive according to a chosen single word theme. They’re a fun way to read the journal from the perspective of fellow readers, and I think it would be great if other online publications did this too.
I hope everyone has a great November. More newsletters to come!
Best,
Nick
Room482 is pleased to present Sterling Coins Mixed With the Counterfeit1, a solo exhibition of works on paper by Philadelphia-based artist and writer Nicholas Heskes. This is Heskes’s first solo exhibition in New York.
In his installation of ink and silverpoint drawings, Heskes invokes symbols, compositions, and characters seemingly invested in medieval or renaissance visual languages of the occult. Heskes’s work investigates structures of messaging, ways in which symbols transmit the very idea of having a message. Signifiers of mystery, of darkness, lead to more signifiers of the same, locked in a loop of speculation as an aesthetic language, making postulation a formal characteristic.
The works in Sterling Coins Mixed With the Counterfeit include representations of mysterious passages, skulls, coffins in tarot-like compositions begging to be interpreted, translated, figured out. The drawings act like a jumbled sentence, laid out in one continuous line circling the exhibition space. Forced into a narrative form, symbols reference and contradict each other. Their speculatory content creates a loop of signifiers; one dark passage leading to a dark door, leading to another passage, and so on.
These empty fragments of a message echo within this closed circuit; deconstructing meaning into a bundle of speculations. Heskes’s works purposefully conflate content with context, pointing to ways in which we recognize the visual instruction of form. The drawings describe vague scenes reminiscent of foggy Memento Moris, too ambiguous to relay anything concrete and yet suggestive enough to read multiple meanings into. As we navigate our media-frenzied world, Heskes’s works seem to connect the old and the new into a particular avenue; one which points to the structure of the conspiracy theory. What makes one follow signifiers of doom through the internet to reach far-fetched conclusions of grandiose proportion? What is the chain of information that locks one in a closed-off loop, as Heskes’s drawings are, that leads to an answer that is just as mystifying as the clues themselves? The works in Sterling Coins Mixed With the Counterfeit exemplify just that—a self—reliant circle of grim messages that insist on bearing the promise of a grand secret, their cultural obsolescence being the only reason we’re acutely aware of their theatrics.
Curated by Bat-Ami Rivlin
Outdoor opening reception Saturday, November 13th. 12p—6p
Sterling Coins Mixed With the Counterfeit
Nicholas Heskes
11.13.21 — 12.12.21
482 Willoughby Ave, Brooklyn NY 11206
Mon — Wed. 11a — 6p
By appointment.
Tzara, Tristan (27). Approximate Man and Other Writings. Black Widow Press, 2005. Print.