Mike Rebholz
Nicholson has collected oddities for 50 years and her exhibit spans centuries.
Natasha Nicholson’s new exhibit at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art is a magically overflowing, ever-changing and ambitious show composed of four rooms painstakingly transplanted from Nicholson’s Madison home.
For more than 50 years, Nicholson, now 70, has been the builder and inhabitant of a world of wonder and delight in common and uncommon objects. She collects discarded ephemera from almost anywhere — the detritus of old shops, forgotten gardens, distant reliquaries and attic cupboards, to name a few.
The transplanted spaces in “Natasha Nicholson: The Artist in Her Museum” — which runs through Nov. 8 — include the Thinking Room (a kind of incubator for new and old found objects), Strata (a sculpture studio and gallery), the Bead Room (where she creates her signature necklaces and displays ethnic adornments) and the Studiolo (or Cabinet of Curiosities).
Any object that moves her heart in some way finds a place in her massive body of work, assembled tableaux, “scenes” or juxtaposed elements distilled — one or two at a time, always separated by boundaries and borders — into new forms through her singular, elegant vision.
“The object itself opens a door,” Nicholson says after greeting me at MMoCA with a warm smile. She leads me into the Thinking Room, where we begin viewing her collection of contemporary pieces alongside objects that are 10,000 years old. Among the oldest are stone Macedonian spindle weights, from 4000 to 3000 B.C., which Nicholson used to make a necklace. Other ancient things include concretions, hard mineral formations that build up over time like pearls. “I’m elevating the common, and sometimes I’m taking junk and elevating it to a whole new level,” says Nicholson.
Nicholson’s remark about “junk” speaks to the humorous nature of many of the works, such as “Number Nine,” a tin and board abstraction that seems to represent the serene nature of a collapse or comic repose. But the breathtaking beauty and simplicity of the compositions themselves — she prefers the term assemblages — speak of something strange, poignant and commanding of respect.
“It takes a long time to do something simple,” she says. “There’s no place to hide.”
Mike Rebhoz
The artist spends time in her transplanted studio and interacts with patrons.
I’d seen photographs of Nicholson’s work prior to my visit, but I wasn’t prepared for the sheer buoyancy of the clean lines and her uncanny sense of balance and order. An exuberant, authoritative energy seems to create its own unifying field. There is so much to take in here, so many compelling assemblages to visit and so many suggested stories contained in each arrangement.
The artist, critic and art historian Linda R. James has written of the “grace” and the “peerless craftsmanship” Nicholson displays in the veneration of found objects “Her art is her studio is her home is her art,” writes James. At times, Nicholson can be found working and reading in various rooms of the gallery’s exhibit.
Other scholars have noted a spiritual aspect to her work, particularly in the use of articles of faith, such as statuary of the Buddha and Christian icons. “I have a passion for sacred objects,” she says. Nicholson possesses the ability to find the sacred in ordinary objects. She found her St. Sebastian — for centuries a frequent subject of homoerotic renderings in art — in a determinedly squat chunk of old wood, prickly with nails.
Antique rusting dental pliers, oxidized angel wings, shimmering engraved prints and postcards, pencil shavings, manuscript pages, fabric and stone, handmade (by the artist) necklaces in labradorite and onyx, shadow boxes housing cast iron and glass — the catalogue of treasures seem in scope and curiosity like something out of the wilder shores of Salvador Dali’s or Marcel Duchamp’s visions. “I owe a debt to the surrealists,” Nicholson says.
The feast for the senses is like a visit to a far-away culture or a lost time, or to a secret and strangely familiar world until now just beyond our own sights. And, perhaps, our own understanding.
Nicholson’s assemblages allow viewers to search for their own meanings. “I like it when people don’t know what they are looking at,” Nicholson says. “Things stand on their own regardless of whether you know the story.”
Nicholson offers us the freedom of discovery she has embraced since deciding as a girl, growing up in Missouri under the rigorous tutelage of Catholic nuns, that she would not only be an artist, but that she would live in an environment of constantly changing artistic creation. None of the assemblages is completely fixed. Even during the run of the exhibit she will continue to make changes.
“I prefer a term used in England for curator, which is keeper,” she tells me as we stand in the Studiola, amid the circles and boxes, bell jars and shelved cabinets in pale green, the traditional color for cabinets of curiosity since the Renaissance. “I don’t own these things. I’m only taking care of them for a brief time.”
And, she adds, as we make our way to a final room, “It’s not how much you have, but what you can make from a little.”
