Nic Wilson: Pavilion of Shadows

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Nic Wilson, "Half Mast," 2020

30’ flag pole and 4x6’ flag

Opening reception: November 13th (by appointment/streaming)

Artist & curator’s talk: November 13th (by appointment/streaming)

Curator Wayne Baerwaldt has dedicated a solo exhibition entitled Pavilion of Shadows at the Art Gallery of Regina (AGR) to emerging artist Nic Wilson’s (he/them) meditations on mourning, banality and celebrity. Wilson’s varied art practise, including sculpture, video, photography and books, spills out of the gallery and onto the grounds of the Neil Balkwill Civic Arts Centre, where a flag of the artist’s devising will fly permanently at half-mast for the exhibition’s duration.

The artist refers to Pavilion of Shadows as “an ever-expanding database of mourning and decay.” Yet, the materials and items that Wilson has gathered to represent our existential fears are varied and eschew straightforward moroseness. Wilson invites us to view his motley collection of marble, ashes, celebrity death merchandise, and photographs of distant galaxies as analogies to the finite nature of bodies. 

Wrestling with ageing, death, faded fame, and fading memories is a familiar and pressing experience for all of us. Though many of the histories, anecdotes, and objects that make up this database are drawn from communal experiences, Pavilion of Shadows is personal. Wilson draws on his/their own embodied experiences and observations to wade through histories of life, death, and the distance between these two states. 

Baerwaldt explains why it’s important to make space, in the gallery and our lives, for Wilson’s complex and compelling art practice: “Space - the syntactical play between exterior and interior - deserves closer examination.” Observing parallels between Wilson’s ordering and grouping of objects in his sculpture and the syntactical constructions of poets, Baerwaldt speculates, “Wilson renders a complicated structuring of space and time that lends itself to rethinking space as a complex of poetic assemblages. I suspect Wilson spends all his time beating against the edge, trying to realize this word, knowing it will never be accomplished in the  human imagination, yet that’s where he finds himself.”