Opening reception: Saturday, February 16, 6 - 9 pm
Nicola Ginzel often leaves her studio to start work with a spool of thread in her pocket. In the city, she meets an old friend she hasn’t seen at a restaurant and orders tea. The bag of fragrant Oolong comes wrapped in an exquisite envelope that feels hopelessly indulgent, but the conversation lasts for hours, proving rich, nostalgic, as if the two were starved for the companionship that had languished over the years. As they part, Ginzel pockets the envelope as a simple memento, but on the subway she finds herself stitching the edges with a powdery blue thread, found in an antique store, making it into something new.
Returning to her studio, she places the tea wrapper in a drawer with dozens of other objects – a chopstick sleeve, swatch from a fur coat, two crushed paper cups, an unmailed postcard from Las Vegas where she worked at a trade show – the detritus of a daily life that might appear like junk, but to Ginzel become charged emblems of her experience. The collection becomes a reliquary of loss, of close friends and intimates, her family’s immigrant history, that she preserves with bees wax, oil pastel, gold acrylic, or plaster. Over a period of months, sometimes years, she will return to these objects, transforming them further, so that we might only see the ghostly echo of a brand name or form in a cup to remind us of their original purpose. In so doing, she makes the objects more solid, tactile, as if the time spent with them deepens her memory.
These artifacts, then, become a meditation on the simplest experience, honoring the sacred nature of daily life, its quiet wonder, and makes us consider the objects as precious offerings in the story of our own mortality. In a gallery setting, these fragments transform once again, laid out in a single line that becomes a sentence in a runic language, a tale told in pictograms, one of discovery and astonishment at the commonplace, a journey that begins with a walk out the front door.
- David Petersen, writer and filmmaker, living and working in New York City
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