![Meredith Nickie, Cartography of Desire: So Thorough the Ruin of Flesh and Stone, 2009 [Detail]](https://aspacegallery.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/CartographyOfDesire.jpg)
Cartographies of Desire
Meredith Nickie
A Space Main Gallery
January 8 – February 13, 2010
Curated by: Taryn Sirove
In Cartographies of Desire, Meredith Nickie brings the pleasures of Chinoiserie, Japonisme and other European ornamentation into tension with the conditions for its appropriation, as a part of her ongoing investigation into issues of race and colonial desire. In this series of installation works, Nickie maps networks of aesthetic and cultural values across seemingly disparate historical and global locations, enlisting Liverpool, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, New Zealand and The New World as sites for the exploration of symbolic and monetary capital flows, a failed narrative of progressive self-rule, and practices of colonial oppression as they are sublimated in discourses of connoisseurship or ornamental pleasures.
Biographies
Meredith Nickie works primarily in sculpture, installation, and photography. Her projects challenge spatial representations of gender, race, and class as framed by the historiographies of imperial rule and the enduring legacies of culture and capital. Nickie’s work has recently been shown at Art in General, New York; Sculpture Center, Long Island City (NY); IDEA Space at Colorado College, Colorado Springs; and A Space Gallery, Toronto; with upcoming exhibitions at PS122, New York; Rush Arts Gallery, New York; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; and the 2010 Sculpture Biennial at Evergreen Museum, Baltimore. In 2007, she received her Master of Fine Arts from Cornell University and in the same year was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Nickie was a DAAD fellow in Berlin from 2007-2008 and a Whitney Museum Independent Study Program fellow from 2008-2009. In 2009, she received a residency grant at the Santa Fe Art Institute, and was also awarded an Emerging Artist Grant from the Ontario Arts Council. Currently a Jackie McLean Fellow at the University of Hartford, she is a Visiting Artist at the Hartford Art School.
Taryn Sirove is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University whose research focuses on issues of identity, citizenship, and arts regulation. Sirove has been involved in curatorial projects for Vtape Distribution and Agnes Etherington Art Center and has written about art for A Space Gallery, the Modern Fuel Booklet Series, and Fuse Magazine.