KEN NICOL
seemed like a good idea at the time
October 17 – November 16, 2024
opening reception: Thursday, October 17, from 5 – 8 pm
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What do I think of Ken Nicol’s work? I like it this much—and I like it this much, too—and I also like it this much, too. I’m stretching out each sentence a little longer than the sentence before it. It’s a made-up way of measuring my liking for his new show, “seemed like a good idea at the time.” Making up a system of measurement seems right: much of what Ken does is about measuring what hasn’t been measured before. I’m thinking here of a series of three sculptures in the show. It’s called “one of these, one of these and one of these.” It anticipates a question many of us are asked in many situations: How big is it? The sculptures answer the question: It’s this big. The first sculpture is 1” long, the distance between his thumb and forefinger when he holds them an inch apart. The second sculpture is 4 7/8”, the distance between his hands when he holds his hands 4 7/8” apart. The third sculpture is 8 ½”, the distance between his hands when he spread his hands out wider. How big is it? It’s “this big” or “yea big”–that’s the system he’s using. It’s a system we’ve all used and Ken’s captured it–when we use it now, we’ll be quoting him. So long to Imperial and Metric–this is the Nicol System, in which measurements are measurements of measurements. In “numbers–as many as they are,” he’s distributed forty-five steel numbers into stacks. There are nine numbers, one through nine; there are nine stacks. The stack of nines has nine nines in it; the stack of eight, eight eights. It’s like this until the number one, which isn’t really a stack at all–it’s a single steel number. The stacks are all the same height, which means the numbers are fractions, but of what? An eight is an eighth of a stack of eight–the stack turns into our standard unit of measurement and it’s Ken who, king-like, decides its dimensions. In “this is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time,” he types the title again and again on a piece of paper–he does it sixty times and sixty more times, 480 times in total, the number of minutes in an eight-hour workday. The workday is a measurement he didn’t create so he recreates it: his workday involves typing the same phrase over and over on a sheet of paper. What type of job is that? That’s his job: making what’s measurable immeasurably sly.
Exhibition essay by Derek McCormack