Review of HEAT at Actual Contemporary

I missed posting this review of HEAT, an exhibition at Actual Contemporary, in October 2015 when it was published on Akimbo. Thank you to Steven Leyden Cochrane for his insights. And thank you to Zachari Logan and Osvaldo Yero for their excellent works, and to Alex Keim and Actual Contemporary for organizing this three-person exhibition.

Though rooted in formal experimentation and play, Grace Nickel’s work seamlessly integrates ancient and modern ceramic technologies. Her twisting Reconfigured – JDZ Column references natural forms, modernist sculpture, and traditional blue-and-white decorative motifs, while collaborations with her husband Michael Zajac exploit a photographic technique adapted in the early seventies to document Maya vase painting. Rollout photographs of Nickel’s richly-textured, abstractly botanical cylindrical reliefs are projected flat and transferred to porcelain tablets, effecting interesting slippages between image and object, ceramics, photography, and the suggestion of painting.

—Steven Leyden Cochrane, “HEAT at Actual Contemporary, Winnipeg,” (review, PDF), at Akimblog, October 6, 2015.