Nancy Holt’s Incessent Motions, Border Crossings Mag, Feature, 2024

The world is nothing if not a series of enormously complex, mostly invisible, cosmic patterns – cycles, sequences and orders. At least it was this way for Nancy Holt (1938-2014), who coolly referred to the above as “systems”. Connecting Holt’s various mediums – poetry, video, audio, photography, drawing, sculpture and installation – is her devotion to exploring both natural and human-made structures. Remarkable was her ability to simplify these incomprehensible orders and the vast via the symbol of the circle,  – a fitting shape with which to explore the infinite and vast connections between heaven and earth, the sun and the moon, life and death, human and more-than-human. Just the right symbol for an artist who considered herself an “artist of perception”.

In contemplating the cyclical, the structural and its relationship to creation, Thinking of structures, it’s hard to ignore the way that Holt’s work itself is ordered and systematic, using the circle as frame, focal point and subject. Circles are both her approach and the mainstay of her production – circles are Holt’sher system.  And it’s She both creates and finds them. through circles that Holt (gently) demandsencourages us, also, to that we examine the structures (both found and made) through which we see and understand the world. With a circle, Holt asks us to look, and look again. As Lisa Le Feuvre, Holt/Smithson Foundation Director writes in the catalogue “Nancy Holt: Locating Perception”, “[Holt] was more interested in how people see than what they see.”

Well, perception is personal. At times even private, but it’s it can also be public and shared. To use perception as material, as Holt did, is to investigate and deconstruct the invisible apertures, the various parts of our our seeing, understanding and, as a result, believing. Perception too, is a system – it has a pattern and an order, it is made and unmade. .  And most importantly, Iit’s is changeable. In In Holt’s 1974 Holt made a video work titled,, “Points of View”, in which she , Holt used a video camera to record the street life outside the windows of Clocktower Gallery in New York City. The camera was positioned at each of the cardinal directions and, directed through circular frames to create, as the artists states, “an interaction between the circles of sunlight shining into the space and the circles of video light being emitted by the monitors.” Once the recording was complete, Holt shared the footage with four artist friends, inviting them to view and discuss the differences in their observations. The work exists as a series of black and white photographs and the original video recording – each emphasizing Holt’s circular framing device. Indicative of later works including her famous “Sun Tunnels”, “Locators” and several photo series, “Points of View” sums up Holt’s practice in advance – to take shift perception, and with it, the temporary to the static, the invisible to the visible, the vast to the focal. 

Eccentric Labour: The Work of Remedios Varo and Mika Rottenberg, Border Crossings Mag, Feature, 2023

A bell rings. A pulley winds transparent thread. Women in closet-sized rooms drip sweat, sniff flowers, and pedal contraptions. Silvery filaments and clotheslines carry pieces of chewing gum, crystals, and plants across space, time, and through wallpaper. This is the work of Remedios Varo and Mika Rottenberg. This is industrial manufacturing made absurd where purposely concealed connections fuel a global engine, barely separating agency from exploitation.

In contrast to the very idea of globalisation and its effects, Varo and Rottenberg use small interior spaces – equally confining and protective – to highlight the often-ambiguous relationship between women’s labor, production, and consumption, making visible the commodification of goods and self. Central to this endeavor is a literal thread joining the beginning and end of cycles, machines, and (female) bodies to a mysterious cosmic order. Their work mirrors the craziness of real life – global commerce and its irrational logic, gender inequality, and supply chain mysteries – but with a focus on the female laboring body and the operations behind manufacturing. And, by doing so, Varo and Rottenberg reverse the command of capitalism where merchandise and service, not people, reign supreme. In their work products still get made (using alchemical-feminist processes) but who knows why or where they end up.