Bathed in Rays of Dying Light

Sunlight is the enemy of art. The sun is a nuclear furnace blasting the earth with beams of radiation: mortifying the fragile works of humans, causing the disintegration of delicate fibres and pigments.

And yet, sunlight, in photographer Nicole Kelly Westman’s mind, is a collaborator. After all, she muses, “All an image is, is light and not light.” ​¹

Early photographers such as Louis Daguerre sought to invert the destructive action of the sun’s rays on their images. They dreamed of enslaving the sun, forcing fingers of light to draw their pictures in emulsions of precious metal painted on glass. Troubled by the metaphorical and ideological violence of photography—taking, capturing, and shooting an image—Westman’s search for an equitable photography led her away from pictures. In my discussions with the artist, she noted the exploitative history of photography as well as “a myth of objective documentation,” or, as phrased so grandly by French philosopher Roland Barthes, as “authentication itself.”​​²

Westman’s work is tinged with dying light and sadness, perhaps because photography is a perpetually backward-looking medium, or maybe because she has had to part with a beloved pastime. “I had a love for photography since I was quite young,” Westman recalls, speaking about her enigmatic position as a photographer who doesn’t make photographs. “You have to have a lot of love for something to really thoroughly critique it.” Hastening to soften her statement, she adds, “Gently.”

The artist seeks to re-enchant fleeting experiences with the poetics of light and the unveiled artifice of the low-tech tools of photographic special effects and movie magic. She employs thin sheets of coloured plastic to tint the light from windows and artificial sources in sumptuous amber, golden or rosy tones. Both the cucolori, a device used in film to break up artificial light by casting naturalistic shadows, and the shadows it creates are essential elements in her installations; as are curtains, whose ritual parting reveals a cinematic spectacle, but are repurposed by Westman as a projection screen. Mirrors, a necessary piece of camera mechanics for focusing light, offer a counterpoint to fixed photographic image in many of her artworks.

Rather than embalming moments in the narrow coffin of photographic emulsion, she enlivens unremarkable bits of light and life, allowing an experience to unfold in the present of her multi-sensory installations.

The sun’s rays, normally unwelcome intruders in a gallery, were invited to animate her work cuculoris, a time machine for shadows at Vancouver’s Western Front. Westman opened a gallery wall to expose a window that had been covered for thirty-four years, only to cover it again immediately with a translucent skin banded in violet, crimson and yellow, and a screen fashioned from puzzle piece-shaped bark scavenged from a fallen Ponderosa Pine. Light, natural and artificial alike, was transformed into a perpetual sunset illuminating the gallery’s white walls, wooden plank floor, a jug of spring water transported by the artist from Harvey Heights Secret Spring in the Rocky Mountains, and two sets of curtains.

The fresh spring water is a typical gesture of care-taking by the artist, offering her audience a cold drink in the heat of summer. But it is also sensual—slipping between lips, caressing the tongue and being absorbed into the body to become blood and tears.

A tumbling collage of tree branches and fields—drenched in tawny summer light or blanketed in the lavender gloom in winter—is cast upon a large, white curtain. The score’s dark chords and foreboding drones are peppered with clanks, sputters, and crashes. Amongst the inkblot shapes of cucolorises and tree canopies silhouetted against the sky, the image of an airplane carving a path through the air is startlingly modern. It makes me feel wistful; I wish that I could be going somewhere.

cucoloris, a time machine for shadows, with its aesthetic of sunset memories, caused me to recall a day, undocumented and virtually forgotten, when forest fires burned close to my hometown. I lay in the grass of my former elementary school sports field alongside my best friend. We gazed at the dull pink disc of the sun, barely visible through thick smoke. White flakes of ash rained down on us. It felt like the end of the world, terrifyingly atemporal, and incomparably beautiful.

faux light falling on drawn drapes and so shallow that you tend to be lonely, both from 2018, illustrate Westman’s careful process of sentimental observation and flaunting of artifice. The artist recreated the comfortingly banal yet beautiful blue-tinged winter light filtering through trees and falling onto her bedroom curtains, mediated through many steps. She began by altering the hue of 12,000-watt film studio lamps, turning their blazing bulbs into weak winter light by affixing theatre gels. Then, she photographed the shadows cast by this light as it passed through a bespoke cucoloris that precisely recreated the pattern of shadows she so often glimpsed from her bed. The resulting image, glowing and dappled with olive, saffron and tangerine, was printed onto a translucent curtain.

This fragile membrane, hovering between representation and object, divides the gallery space. Passing through the sliver of an opening causes one’s body to brush against the silken folds, disturbing the balance of knowing and not knowing.

A companion work, so shallow that you tend to be lonely, is built upon the spooky spacial technology of the mirror. Everything glimpsed within the mirror’s frame is reddened by a film of plastic. An image of the cucoloris used to create the shadows on the curtain—rectangular, wood-grained, riddled with snaking holes—is pasted onto the centre of the mirror, disrupting the illusion of depth behind the frame with this second layer of artifice.

As I attempt to write about Westman’s practice, I struggle with the unwieldy burden of prose. Rather than heft words around the page, I long to let the artwork wash me in ambient sounds and bathe me in warm light. I want to rest in its embrace.

Words, as immaterial as light beams or sound waves, sometimes take the shape of the inexpressible. In Westman’s work, they are embroidered by Jolie Bird onto a faux sunset in a facsimile of the artist’s hand. Handwriting is so personal as to have forensic worth; fingers brush paper as gently as they brush skin. Confounded by the impossible task of memorializing a visit to the mineral springs with a friend, Westman wondered, “Maybe a poem could.”

one
season
past run
off
you sway
into my
body on
the edge
of an
echoing
glacial
river

my body
buoyant
submerged in warmth
your arms
resting below
cloaked in the
murky shadow
of my hair

Grief is a language inaccessible to those who haven’t experienced it. Although Westman’s artworks deal with the sharp pain of trauma and the suffocating weight of grief, she is careful not to arouse trauma in others or force viewers to become her therapist.

There are times you want to give up and feel someone’s arms catch you. Rather than opening raw wounds, Westman’s works make it possible to be vulnerable.

Westman’s work reminds me of my own experiences of physical and emotional pain, so sharp it eclipsed all else. The times I have lain on the bathroom floor, barely noticing the chill of the tiles cooling my scalding tears. From the snug bubble of awareness that extends no further than my exhaled breath, I followed the minute fluttering of the jagged edge of a leaf etched by the sun as a shadow upon the floor. This distraction allows me to move through time, minute by minute. I recognized this moment as analogous to those that Westman crafts from sound waves, light beams, and memories.

The artist ventures bravely into the unspeakable and unknowable quality of overwhelming physical or emotional pain and cocoons viewers in a gentle poetics of loss in her 2019 installation for every sunset we haven’t seen, presented at the Dunlop Art Gallery’s Sherwood Gallery.

“Grief steals language,” she states flatly. Working with collaborator Kurtis Denne, Westman created a sound map of regret. Rustling, chiming waves of sound, punctuated with the mournful call of a train’s horn ripple throughout this tiny gallery space in suburban Regina, filling it with melancholy and burnished light.

Westman has cannily exploited the well-understood signs of nostalgia and truth to insulate viewers from the unspeakable. Papering the gallery lights, a narrow window and even glass doors that separate the gallery from the library in theatre lighting gels, she transforms the objective gallery architecture into a golden mausoleum of remembrance. Everything appears yellowed with age, as if viewed from a distance of many decades.

A film is projected onto the gossamer folds of twin curtains. Its jerkiness, golden hue and blooms of light forge an immediate visual connection to home movies from eras past. Like memories rising unbidden and disorganized, the film flicks through an inventory of images—the shadows of branches fall across softly waving blinds; sunlight glints through a canopy of leaves; spangles of light bounce off the rushing water of a stream, and the setting sun makes an orange stain.

A bench fashioned from three slabs of richly grained hardwood is positioned behind the curtain-cum-screen, a clear invitation to sit while the film unfolds as reddened and hazy as a summer afternoon glimpsed through closed eyes. Within this space, the passage of time is unmarred by the tyranny of the clock, marked instead by the sway of tree limbs and the slant of sunbeams. Westman, who is of mixed Icelandic and Métis heritage, observes that “sunlight is non-colonial time.”

Turning away from the film, I see in the angle of a corner three small mirrors. Each fiery shade is quantified by the string of numbers and letters along the edge, a key to the precision manufacturing behind the thin sheets of coloured film and the fleeting moments of sunset that they seek to replicate. Through the mirror, I see my reflection as one with the film world.

Each mirror also reflects a cucoloris constructed of unusually fine, exotic wood. This care suggests that Westman aims to simulate the way that light filters through certain, very special trees, illuminating a treasured time, place or memory.

Photography, according to Barthes, is a melancholy medium, proving what once was, not what is. It’s nearly impossible to separate memories from photos. Westman’s photography without photographs creates a space for us to live and dream in the present with wonder and artifice.

Sandee Moore is an artist whose art criticism and scholarly texts have been published in various books and periodicals. Moore is Curator of Exhibitions and Programming at the Art Gallery of Regina and a sessional lecturer at the University of Regina; she also produces a bi-weekly visual arts program for CJTR 91.3 FM Regina Community Radio. 

1. Nicole Kelly Westman, personal Interview by Sandee Moore, August 8, 2019.
2. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections On Photography, translated by Richard Howard, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 87.

This article is published in issue 37.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue