...and it's ending one minute at a time.
"Ken’s inaugural exhibition at Olga Korper Gallery will feature a selection of works rooted in the artist’s established trajectory of repetitive mark making, collecting, assembling and organizing/re-organizing. This exhibition marks the realization of three major projects that Ken has been laboring towards for several years. Many of these pieces reflect the march of time as a slow, steady trickling away of precious minutes. Ken’s painstaking process records the hours, days and weeks of spending this precious and finite currency of time with acute self-awareness.
This is your life…, the first major project and the largest body of work in the exhibition, is comprised of 55 grids, 30 x 20 inches each of hand typed sentences. Each sheet counts down the number of minutes in an eight-hour work day, minute by minute. Each grid after the first begins by removing the first character of the sentence and results in a new pattern emerging on the page.
In keeping with his tradition of assembling objects into groupings of one hundred, Ken has spent the last decade collecting and repairing one hundred Westclox Baby Ben alarm clocks for his monumental work one hundred of the same clock. These hand wound timepieces from the late 1940s present a unified front of unfeeling mechanical faces as they whisper away the lost seconds of the day.
Flogging a Dead Horse: The Seasons, the third major project is another time-based work. It is a mark-making action where Ken makes tally marks on a large sheet of paper with a pen until the ink begins to fade and eventually runs out entirely. The remainder of the work is finished with the inkless pen by scratching the tally marks into the page until the paper is filled. Each 100 hour work was completed within a single season and each is exhibited with the pen, or “dead horse”, that was used up in the creation of the work.
Ken’s discipline, humour and precise execution combine in a staggering display of what he deems “obsessive order.” Each pen stroke and typed character demands to be acknowledged against the backdrop of the fading sounds of clocks winding down echoing the fading ink drawings and failing typewriter ribbons." (OKG).
Reviews
Ben Portis, COHERING HIS COMPULSIONS KEN NICOL ADVANCES AT OLGA KORPER, momus.ca, November 5, 2015.