<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/101-DO7-IMG2-IM_Jones_Lahde_From-a-Straight-Line-to-a-Curve_03_CMYK-1024x683.png\")
From a Straight Line to a Curve<\/em>, 2014, detail, commissioned by
The Koffler Gallery, University of Waterloo Art Gallery, 2019.
Photo : Scott Lee, courtesy of the artist & MKG127, Toronto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
In the introduction to his 2011 book World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement<\/em>, philosopher Robert P. Crease describes two systems for translating the environment into measured quantities: something he calls \u201cthe almanac of the world\u201d; and a system that focuses on embodiment.”2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Robert P. Crease, World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement <\/em>(New York, NY: Norton, 2011), 25.<\/span> In the almanac of the world, we relate to a particular object in measuring \u2014 to your foot, a bird\u2019s life, a seed or collection of them \u2014 and connect it to the world,\u201d Crease writes. \u201cWhen measures are embodied, we relate to a network, and it is not really the (replaceable and possibly flawed) specific measuring element that we put into play and connect with the world, but the entire network.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Ibid, 30.<\/span>Measuring the world is a way of ab- stracting it, describing things through a system of numerical relationships, proportions, and standards. It turns an ontological environment into an epistemological system. But standard measures are relevant only if we can picture \u2014 if we have a real and practical sense of \u2014 what they are. A measuring object such as a yardstick has a life as an object, passed between schoolchildren, used to measure distances between desks, held up as a symbol of authority. It can be understood in terms of ontology as well as epistemology, and it is the yardstick\u2019s material reality that makes the epistemological system that it\u2019s part of familiar. The complicated geometry of a geodesic dome \u2014 circles and triangles, and spheres and planes; a model of how flat and round can be made to work together \u2014 gets familiarized through Lahde\u2019s choice of materials. Meanwhile, the shape that she constructs from them tricks our eyes into turning the straight lines of her yardsticks into sections of an arching curve. Her manipulations of an object employed both ontologically and epistemologically start to unsettle our understanding of both the yardstick and the yard. The network that Crease describes gets pulled off kilter \u2014 a straight line arcs into a curve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lahde doesn\u2019t always let her materials remain intact. In From Point A to Point B<\/em> (2018), she cuts up metre sticks and puts them back together so they zig-zag down a wall, none of them reaching a full metre from brass-bound tip to brass-bound tip. What was a base measure, the anchor in a system, becomes a problem of addition and transforms the wall behind it.<\/p> <\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s something utopian in these interventions in measured space, a love of pattern, an ordered play. Describing Jacques Derrida\u2019s nondialectical materialism, theorist Pheng Cheah notes, \u201cBecause it refers us to the radically other, materiality is also the opening to an unforeseeable future, an \u00e0-venir (to come) that cannot be anticipated as a form of presence.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Pheng Cheah, \u201cNondialectical Materialism,\u201d Diacritics 38, no. 1\/2 (2008): 148.<\/span>Viewed this way \u2014 as a reminder of all that is outside our selves \u2014 material becomes not only familiar and potentially useful, but hopeful and ethically necessary. And Lahde\u2019s materialist practice takes on more than alternative geometries. She reveals the material agency of the abstract, epistemological world through her attention, revealing how intimately the two are connected. When systems reveal their material, they reveal the possibility of the unforeseeable where previously there were only fixed signs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reorienting our attention toward the material world means more than simply grappling with an increasingly complex understanding of the physical universe. As philosopher Elizabeth Grosz puts it, \u201cOntology has been increasingly directed toward explaining scientific and mathematical models, for which ethical consid- erations seem conceptually extrinsic. Yet an ontology entails a consideration of the future, not only of what we can guarantee or be certain but above all what virtualities in the present may enable in the future.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Elizabeth Grosz, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2017), 2.<\/span>Lahde\u2019s work is intimately concerned with the discovery of virtualities, which she accesses by bridging the gap between ontology and epistemology, finding the places where they collapse into hyper-familiarity. Lahde\u2019s most recent work focuses not on yardsticks or other distinct objects but on the ever-present zero. The artist finds them everywhere that things are printed: in books and magazines, in supermarket flyers and advertisements of every kind. Cutting out each one, she turns them into her latest material, tiny scraps of quantities liberated from the page by an Exacto knife. They swirled inward and outward in spiraling collages and were echoed in the circular objects that she\u2019d stacked and ordered or linked together in chains that hung from the ceiling, the beginnings of as-yet-unnamed works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf you look at zero you see nothing,\u201d Robert Kaplan writes at the beginning of his book The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero.<\/em>\u201c But look through it and you will see the world7<\/sup><\/a><\/span>.\u201d 7 <\/a> - Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero<\/em>(New York, NY: Oxford, 1999), 1.<\/span>Zero is, more than nothing, a place holder that allows counting to expand exponentially \u2014 ten to the nth degree. It is a place where Grosz\u2019s virtualities meet Cheah\u2019s reading of Derrida\u2019s material sense of difference, because zero is both the promise of every greater and smaller quantity and total absence, material\u2019s inverse, its ultimate other. Pulled from their contexts, Lahde\u2019s zeros were no longer meaningful because of their positions, nor could they add up to any greater whole. They were simply there in their zero-ness, materialized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a poem that is mostly about Iceland and monogamy (and therefore also about time and two-ness), Anne Carson describes a library for glaciers (Roni Horn\u2019s Vatnasafn project in Stykkish\u00f3lmur), \u201cAs perfectly ordered as books would be. \/ But they are melted.\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Anne Carson, \u201cWildly Constant,\u201d in Float (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2016), lines 98-99.<\/span>Moved into a library, the glaciers become book-like, ready to open their secrets, to be read. But the space transforms them: they melt and become less glacier-like, but also less book-like. Elsewhere in the same poem, Carson talks about knowing (she uses the French word, savoir and invokes Marcel Proust, guardian of material memory) as a form of desire. A longing that goes outwards, into the future. Her melted glaciers seem to defy this kind of knowing, since their change of state in the library, a place of knowledge, makes them, in a fundamental way, not glaciers anymore. They reveal a material secret about the states of matter and a metaphorical secret about the fragility of glaciers. Like Carson\u2019s glaciers, Lahde\u2019s work sees the world in terms of material that is both meaning and form, both the tragedy of the melting ice and the desire that brings it into the library, hoping to capture the past and change the future. In the interaction between ideas and things, ontology and epistemology, Lahde envisions a kind of harmony. In Grosz\u2019s view, this is the moment when materialism moves beyond causality. \u201cAs mutually implicated, ideality opens materiality up not just as the collectivity or totality of things but as a cohesive, meaningful world, a universe with a horizon of future possibilities.\u201d9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Grosz, The incorporeal, 15.<\/span>All the numbers in the universe, positive and negative, add up not to nothing, but to zero.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
What was a flat plane, something to be measured in terms of dimension (height, length, surface area), is now a surface over which infinite, meandering routes might be charted. How many metres high is it, when a metre no longer has to run in a straight line? The metre, an Enlightenment push of measurement into further abstractions (in this case a proportion, one forty-millionth of Earth\u2019s circumference), has only been further distanced from earlier, bodily measures such as the yard in its most recent definition, which sets the standard in terms not of Earth but of the speed of light, the distance travelled by a photon in 1\/299,792,458 of a second. This movement away from things and toward mathematical constants \u2014 from perceptible material experiences like the width of a hand or the length of a foot to a material reality beyond the realm of human perception \u2014 draws us further and further from material immediacy, yet Lahde\u2019s interventions on increasingly distant and abstracted systems and measures snap into focus. They become material again.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our world, even our measured world, is more than a place of static systems and the standards that give them authority. It is also a world of infinity and geometry, of relation and proportion, of curved and linear space. Lahde\u2019s work does more than simply engage with the objects that bring these mathematical concepts into familiar spaces such as a classroom or even an art gallery. It repositions us in relation to these concepts. We can trace the new path of her metre sticks, or try to calculate the yardage needed to make a geodesic dome, but only if we follow a logic that balances the thing with what it stands for. Critics such as Alison Snowball, who describes Lahde as converting \u201crational building blocks into irrational imaginaries,\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Alison Snowball, \u201cHow to Follow Your Own Success: Kristiina Lahde at MKG127,\u201d review, Momus, October 14, 2015, accessible online.<\/span>tend to focus on the way her use of materials seems to transform concepts, undermining them even, the artist becoming a kind of unscrupulous or devilish translator using the rules of one language (form, material) to crack open another, scrambling its grammar to create something separate and new. But Lahde\u2019s imaginaries are not, strictly speaking, irrational. A series of lines meandering across a wall can add up to a metre of distance. The straight-sided triangles of a geodesic dome do contain a geometry built on great circles and curved space. These works contain an understanding of the material world as something that is as flexible, astounding, and wholly rational as multiple infinities.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/101-DO7-IMG3-IM_Jones_Lahde_Spiral-Study-Archimedian_CMYK-C-905x1024.png\")
Spiral Study (Archimedian)<\/em>, 2018.
Photo : Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of the artist
& MKG127, Toronto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/101-DO7-IMG4-IM_Jones_Lahde_Zero-Gravity_02_crop-819x1024.png\")
Zero Gravity<\/em>, detail, 2020.
Photo : Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of the artist
& MKG127, Toronto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n