![Kate Levant [a ~ploy~] Propel’dChloe Platform Failure, Trans’for Asiatic, 2016 Gorgonia ventalina octocoral, left wedge platform shoe, melamine chopsticks, steel wire, solder, misc. metal hardware on plastic 63 x 17 x 4 in. 160.0 x 43.2 x 10.2 cm](https://artlogic-res.cloudinary.com/w_920,h_920,c_limit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto/artlogicstorage/moniquemeloche/images/view/1ad4ff56a36824e66bfd2f6351be25fbj/moniquemeloche-kate-levant-a-ploy-propel-dchloe-platform-failure-trans-for-asiatic-2016.jpg)
160.0 x 43.2 x 10.2 cm
Kate Levant makes her much anticipated return to Chicago for her second solo exhibition with moniquemeloche, …Which’s Ploying the Fans, featuring a new body of work comprised of objects and energies that the artist has accumulated globally, from the islands of the Caribbean, New York, and Maine.
The show’s title is a reassembly of the phrase “witches foiling the plans”, referencing the traditional narrative that depicts witches as agents of chaos. Through the destruction of language and found materials, Levant herself is an agent of disorder, esoterically reconfiguring and layering her resources to challenge the audience’s understanding of the natural and unnatural, verbal and non-verbal.
Essay
By Karen PattersonCurator of Exhibitions and Collections at the John Michael Kholer Arts Center, September 2016
In Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter, she defines “thing-power” as the curious ability of certain materials to "animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle.” Although thing-power materialism is a hypothetical, the concept is an attempt to depict the nonhumanity that flows around and through humans. In her recognition that people are not the only significant factors affecting and influencing us, Bennett calls for deep appreciation and empathy for the materials that impact the ways in which we navigate this world.
What are the implications of recognizing that everything – from rocks to twigs – is alive and influencing our decisions?
For both Kate Levant and Nnenna Okore, materials found in the landscape are fundamental to their art practice. Intuitive, deeply in tune with the things that surround them, both artists honor the unmistakable powers of the materials they select and opt to use as conduits, channeling the material’s energy from the landscape, through the studio and onto the gallery walls. For both these artists, the entities they choose to work with are crystallizations of experiences, everything is in process, constantly undergoing transformation, continually experiencing change until at last the piece, the moment, is complete. To Levant and Okore, the world can be seen as an interwoven web of materials, all affecting each other, competing, forming alliances, initiating new processes and dissipating others.
For Nnenna Okore and her works, When all is said and done, 2016, and Body Language, 2015, the vibrant material is burlap.
Of this choice, she says, “At every juncture of my process, I literally feel its pulse. It starts by shedding its fibers, as soon as it is picked up. Then its distinctive and earthy smell fills the air. Once in contact with the dye bath, its strings take on a kinky and contorted state. It dries crisp and veiny. The burlap continues to morph at the encounter of a new space. It eagerly responds to twists and turns; the lighting and air flow. It takes over—diving, navigating and cascading though the space with dramatic elegance, fragility and grace. It breathes new life.”
The red and black fibrous installation in the window is the artist’s rumination on the cycle of life and death. Okore celebrates the ritual of aging with this work, as the black color denotes dying and decay, the red vein-like threads emerges through the skeletal form to signal the body and re-birth.
Both artists’ works were only resolved in the gallery space during the final hours of installation.
For Levant, chance and happenstance pervade the materials with which she works. The unpredictability of finding the perfect material to use and further letting the material persuade her creative process is a seemingly disruptive and rebellious act, rising against the pursuit of false structure and order. In some ways, Levant’s works announce an escape from robotic processes of the world and favor tactility, chaos and emotion—emphasizing the magic and vulnerability in everyday life.
Levant contemplates the materials she selects deeply, such that it is selected to be the anchoring aspect – the constant – of her intuitive process. For this exhibition, a nylon spinnaker sail is the subject through which Levant contemplates larger issues and is featured prominently throughout the gallery.
As she says, “I like to think of my work as an equation – like solving for x – in which we need to place something real and stable so that the chaos has something to respond to. I feel like this work lives on the risky edge of belief systems, nothing tells me to believe in the sail as having those powers, but there is something inherent in that material that persuades me to make.”
In [a ~play~] Broomstick’s Periodstracic Transitional Device_lead_Verdant Ventalina’d Ventilatorr, Levant employs the sail and other materials to think about climate change, about regeneration, about second lives and about perspective. The list of materials reads as a witch’s brew: nylon spinnaker sail, electrical tape, gorgonian ventalina octocoral, steel wire, solder and melamine chopsticks. Collected and acquired in what Levant describes as, “the magic of the moment,” they are assembled to be appreciated as if an aerial view of a landscape or a detailed look through a microscope. At once cellular and from a distance, Levant’s trickery destabilizes us.
In Nacre’ous ))cellum, the work is more introspective and intimate. The iridescent surface reminds us of precious pearls or a moonlit sky. It suggests a projection screen on which the movie is just coming into focus or a mirror with an abstracted reflection. Levant draws us into the light and asks us to project our own imagery and ideas on the material’s surface.
Materials are alive because of their capacities to affect change, to have consequences, to shape relationships and to say something. Humans aren’t autonomous subjects; we are composed by a complex web of active components and resources. For Levant and Okore, the materials they select serve as tactile memory markers, stemming from their experiences and connections to their surroundings. They then weld, bend, dye, assemble, until the finished work speaks back.
