Nika Kaiser returns to Collective Misnomer
September 3rd, 2022
solo screening "desert oceanic"
with a LIVE PERFORMANCE!!!
Q&A after the screening
8:30pm Doors
9:00pm (not punk time) screening.
@The Art Park
(we'll have chairs)
1930 35th Street
DENVER, CO 80216
FREE - We got a grant to pay the artist.
If you wish to Donate money to CM (accepted and appreciated) those funds will
go to future CM projects and general sustaining of the project.
Bio: Nika Kaiser is a photographer, video and installation artist. Born in the desert of Tucson, Arizona, this native landscape informs her work as she combines ideas of psychological transformation, regional histories, folklore and environmental conservation.
Kaiser received her MFA from University of Oregon in 2013. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including shows at Bruce High Quality Foundation, Brooklyn, NY; Portland Museum of Modern Art, Portland, OR; Disjecta Gallery, Portland OR; Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, NY; University of Dubai, UAE; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson AZ; WNDX Festival of the Moving Image, Winnipeg, MB; Antimatter [Media Art], Victoria, BC; University of Rostock, GE.
She has been the recipient of numerous awards, most recently the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship. She is an alumni member of the collective Ditch Projects in Springfield, OR and current member of the female video collective Ungrund. Her photographs and videos have been featured in Vice Magazine and on National Public Radio.
Title: THRESHOLD : Sonoran Sea
Year: 2017
Statement: Threshold: Sonoran Sea is an immersive multi-channel video installation. Set in coastal Sonora, Mexico at the meeting of the ocean and desert, a narrative of human and animal transference takes place as viewers move through two opposing projections that situate them centrally within the surreal threshold between water and land.
Navigating an isolated coastal landscape at the precipice of anthropocentric destruction, a woman traverses bleached architecture and beach dunes in solitude, witnessing animals engaging in the tenuousness of survival, supernatural beings, and dolphins with whom she ultimately converges through the allusion of transcendence or death. This work is a meditation on imagined endings set amidst two landscapes (desert and sea) that both bare the limits and expanses of the edges of our sustained reality.
Title: THE FARAWAY
Year: 2018
Statement: The Faraway, originally a site-specific installation at Tucson AZ artist-run space The American Institute of Thoughts and Feelings, is a rumination on Georgia O’Keeffe’s legacy and fraught romance embodied in relation the colonial west; an exploration comprised of simulated border terrain, performance footage of O’Keeffe’s murals in the belly of Radio City Music Hall, the cloying scent of decomposing lilies, and a soundscape of sultry saxophone loops.
Title: THE PASSAGE
Year: 2021
Statement: In the past decade as hydrologists have studied Lake Powell the reality of climate change-impacted decline to water levels has already transpired, and the inevitable outcome is the reemergence of Glen Canyon from beneath its depths; the second largest canyon preceding the Grand Canyon which was carved by the Colorado River. In recent surveys of the lake, increasingly chalky calcified walls of the canyon stand starkly as maps of rapid evaporation, previously submerged trees and cacti are revealed as silhouettes shrouded in white silt, and remnants of trash from decades of recreational lake use are entangled in the arid deposits of the lake bed.
The Passage conveys an imagined future in which the past human, animal, and botanical elements of Glen Canyon reemerge from revealed slots in drowned canyon walls: marbled in red mud and white calcium, processing as reanimated, ghostlike forms in a re-destined reckoning of this simultaneously slow and rapid environmental disaster. The Passage offers ceremony for the loss of place and an implicit post-human future. Text excerpts from Gilles Deleuze’s Desert Islands suggest possibilities for the cyclical rebirth that exists in imminent dissolution.
Title: DRIFT **Live performance**
Year: 2022
Statement: Drift is an evolving collaborative piece by Nika Kaiser and Nathan Stickel that combines cycles of live audio, video and field recordings. The work was initially inspired by conversations and concepts embedded in Jackie Wang’s 2018 text Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect and composed during monsoon season in Tucson, Arizona. Drift engages with themes of limitlessness and cyclical patterns that through increased augmentation generate interconnectivity and expanse.