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Sculptor explores legacy of Singularity’s various forms

Kika Thorne’s Multiplicity of the Singularity When: Opening tonight, 5 to 7 p.m. Where: LAB Gallery at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria Admission: Free for opening, regular gallery admission otherwise ($13 adults, $11 seniors/students, $2.
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Artist Kika Thorne's sculptural installation Singularity will be accompanied by documentation of past installations during her show, Multiplicity of the Singularity, at LAB Gallery in Victoria.

Kika Thorne’s Multiplicity of the Singularity

When: Opening tonight, 5 to 7 p.m.

Where: LAB Gallery at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

Admission: Free for opening, regular gallery admission otherwise ($13 adults, $11 seniors/students, $2.50 youth, $28 family, members and children free).

Artist Kika Thorne is still learning new things about her sculptural installation Singularity.

“This particular work is still fascinating to me, I’ve been studying it now since 2005,” Thorne said with genuine excitement.

Elastic swatches of black and pink lycra stretch across space, meeting in the centre like a warped hourglass or an abstract balancing bird. Rare earth magnets and aircraft cables add weight and energy to the piece, which Thorne said has the “strange capacity” to expand to fill a room.

Having watched Singularity change with each new space it fills, Thorne has begun exploring the historicity of the work. When installed at the LAB Gallery, it will be accompanied by documentation of past installations, including a video of the piece in the empty field of the G8 protest zone in 2010. Each iteration builds upon the last — thus, the “Multiplicity of the Singularity.”

“In some ways, it’s about many things,” Thorne said before launching into its relationship with historical works and with each institution it lands in, as well as natural philosophy, molecular compositions and activism.

It makes sense to explore Singularity’s history in Victoria, since that’s where the seeds of the project began. Singularity was born in 2006 during Thorne’s studies as a master’s student in the University of Victoria’s fine arts department. Initially, she said, she believed it was a piece about terror and love.

“The work began as a vision that came after a night. I was profoundly in love at the time and it turned out that my lover was crossing the North Sea,” she said.

It would be a 12-hour voyage for her partner. At the same time, Thorne embarked on her own 12-hour journey at home, obsessively scouring the Internet for a research project. She landed on a Pentagon report about abrupt climate change and its implications for national security.

“I’d never seen anything like this before and I read it and it was really shocking to me. It described prior mass extinctions and shutdowns of the thermohaline circulation,” — the ocean “conveyor belt” driven by a careful balance of salinity and temperature, which is threatened by rapidly melting ice flows. Thorne described the North Sea as an engine.

But what she learned at UVic, under the guidance of artists Lynda Gammon and Luanne Martineau, was that the artwork was about more than terror and love — and less, all at once.

“I thought the piece was about this climate catastrophe and the sort of surging desires that were in me. But what Lynda and Luanne helped me do was figure out, no, this is just what it is. These are simply materials in a room and they come out of a legacy. So for me, I’ve invested in trying to understand: What is that legacy?” she said.

“It was not so much them trying to shift how I made things, but how I understood what I made.”

Since then, Thorne has explored the work of the Russian constructivist artists who preceded her, like Vladimir Tatlin, Naum Gabo and Kazimir Malevich. She’s studied what it would take, chemically, to separate carbon from oxygen in a car-emissions filter. She’s explored how the energy-flows directed through Qi Gong parallels those held between magnets in Singularity, as well as the magnetism of the planets. And she’s excited about the creative possibilities of individuals who are living their passions — whether in science or entrepreneurship — and share them with one another.

“Research is to form as soil is to flower,” she wrote in an email later. “The forms are open, they have no meaning, but they have energy, and that is everything.”

asmart@timescolonist.com