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From Inside, Out – The Same Thing Looks Different, Jen Atiken


By Alex Bowron
The Power Plant, Toronto
September 2023




I slide my hands slowly across their surfaces. They are smooth and raw, not without the stubborn resistance of texture. My fingers curl and linger on these fibreglass planes, at their edges, along their seams, uncovering joins and joints. I am drawn to the curious way they lean and fold. There is integrity in their protrusions. They jut and curve and hang in space as my body juts and curves and hangs. Their ridges, tags, dimples, and freckles echo my own. My palm passes over their cracks: patched and sanded, cross-hatched and cared for—evidence of the hands that made them. I trace the trajectory of their fabrication, at times lofty, optimistic, and graceful, but otherwise grounded, quiet, and questioning. Movement is my prerogative. If I want to see them, I must remain in their orbit long enough to do so. It is clear to me that their angles were laboured over so that I may in turn labour over them. Each sculpture is a problem to solve. Bending and peering, I strain to uncover new perspectives on existing geometries. Their skeletal interior is not like mine, but I yearn to place myself inside of them. I am looking for the boundary that will set them apart from me. If I remain focused enough and open enough for long enough, perhaps this tension between self and other will be resolved.

To further see, feel, and touch, I write. I think about my audience, but really, I write for myself. I fill the pages aimlessly at first, stream of consciousness meeting passion halfway. Then I become strategic, researched, academic, desperate—pulling words like pulling teeth. I yearn to return to my first response, but concepts have distanced me. These letters are flat, this page is flat, and I must select the right words and place them in perfect harmony if I am going to be able to reflect what I see. This cerebral challenge is best undertaken physically, so I labour until my hands are cramped, fingertips raw, neck and brow furrowed, eyes blurry and strained, head aching. To write about art is to recognize the incongruous relationship between language and objects, and then to write anyway. I am a translator. My job is to translate the sentiment and intention of an artwork into words, and I strive to communicate the slippery experience of doing that. Ask me today if I am confident that words have any business relating themselves to art. Ask me again tomorrow and my answer will be different.

These objects are singular, dynamic, philosophical. Their volumes are intuitive. They occupy space confidently one minute and precariously the next, but they are at home in their objecthood. They speak through metaphor using the language of sculpture, defined by their material, shape, volume, surface, texture, line, and scale. Every abstract idea they hold boils down to a summation of literal facts. Like me, they are three-dimensional bodies occupying, holding, demarcating, and contemplating space. Unlike me, they express their physicality purely, as uncontaminated, shape-shifting shapes. They can be defined by what they are not: not body, not furniture, not monument, not machine, not building. This is where their status as art resides, in their not being ordinary things. They have no need to prove themselves because they occupy a vital position as markers of human expression. There is a beauty in their autonomy that inspires a self-determination of my own. They use what is most palpable within themselves as an intellectual guide, and I follow suit.

To learn to see these objects, I have had to put myself through years of exposure therapy. I show up, am present, look, breathe, set aside my ego, look some more, and then do it again. It is through looking that I unite experience with insight. I look until I feel sick from looking. I strive to uncover the leads the artist followed to make these things so that I can trace her trajectory in reverse. If I dig deep enough, I will find myself inside her work, alone. I know I am there when I can’t see the forest for the trees. This is my happy place. It is from this interior position that I can write my way back out again. I can see the viewer better from here. I can see the space we share. I can feel the energy of the maker—her intentions, her commitment, her insecurities. In some intuitive way, being here makes me aware that inquiry is the origin of thought. It is no more specific than that. Fundamental forms ask fundamental questions. Once I’ve located this thread, I reach a point of dissolution, and this is the moment when the objects begin to look back at me. They ask me to experience the same light, temperature, sound, and mood that they experience. I am an imposter, even if I was invited, so I retreat from their insides to attempt something akin to objectivity. From where I stand now, I can identify the ambiguity of their solid state. They present as formal but are in fact emotional. Now I’ve seen them from afar, from inside, and in hindsight.

In this progression through time, form, and space, there is a moment when volume gives way to line, leaving the suggestion of a blueprint behind. Busy and minimal at once, the slopes and corners of these three-dimensional lumber drawings occupy space by leaving it largely unoccupied. Their subdued gestures delineate the physicality of emptiness. They are the bare bones of sculpture, skeletal and sharp-edged, daintily clinging to their architectural supports.
I imagine them as spider webs, or circuitry, an exposed network of mechanical potential, anatomic transmitters of a vibrating hum. As visual extensions of an elemental force they are the successor to every voluminous, geometric form that came before them. When space is starved of volume, structure becomes a mere suggestion, and its armature a phantom limb. Their kinetic energy has always felt inevitable to me, and when these linear elements enter digital space projected onto gallery walls, I learn the litany of ways that shape can come into being. As with the three-dimensional drawings, these shifting forms serve to structure the space around them. They are unadulterated and free to move, divorced from architecture at last. The dichotomy between black and white illustrates a determined push and pull, opening, closing, rounding out and folding in. I anticipate each new iteration and listen to the breathy audio: in, out, the drag, the hiss, the line being drawn. This is the realm of the artist’s extended campaign to understand the limits, and limitlessness, of her practice.

I imagine her surrounded by these abstract things that she has laboured over and wonder at what point they took on a life of their own. In my mind her body aches from the work of it, from the carrying, pulling, rubbing, mixing, pouring, cutting. She has had to make accommodations. They have become as much a part of her body as her body is a part of them. An elemental connection is visible in the physical evidence of her decision-making process: her construction skills, her indecision, her bouts of confidence, all showing up in her objects’ surfaces. The moment when the work comes into itself is poignant and profound. From nothing, nothing, nothing, suddenly there is something. This point of completion, which is never fixed, is a point where logic and intuition collide. In that moment, her job is to swoop in and finesse. She is a devotee, committed to the primacy of the third dimension, to trial and error, to precision, and to showing up. She will work until each new shape finds itself, and then she will move on to the next.

Over years of rhythmically and obsessively returning to these forms, she has learned to prioritize only those areas which have earned her sustained attention. The narrower the playing field, the greater the impact of small adjustments and the less likely it is that she will become lost in endless possibility. She tracks her curiosity, turning it inward. Movement is her prerogative as well. Her body pivots and loiters in proximity to these objects, as does mine. If either of us—author or artist—were to stand still, they would stop responding to our gaze. She must find new points for observation by extending an existing angle, considering new ratios, testing, removing, renewing, tossing out. I in turn must allow my body to respond anew through continuous exposure. These sculptures in front of me are performing a dynamic dance with my body and mind. Be patient, she tells me, and the works will begin to pose the questions we should be asking ourselves.

I crave authentic connection and for a moment I have found it here. If I put myself in the objects’ path, in direct proximity to their primary state, I will become more in tune with my own primacy and refine my technique for seeing everything. A practice like hers embraces the dissonance of finding the infinite within the mundane. In a tangible and immediate way, her sculptures do this by collaborating with their surroundings, by resembling the towering monochrome wall, concrete floors, slanted ceilings, steel beams, and even the shafts of light that creep in from the outside. Their lines and planes echo the lines and planes around them, almost as though they grew here—almost as though they are the innate interior of this building. In a more ethereal and lasting sense, they do this by migrating freely from one realm to another, from physical to immaterial and back again. I am reminded here of the meditation practice that I can’t seem to maintain. Sitting still, with stillness, is more challenging for me than I care to admit. I understand the principles: allow the noise to enter, make space for every thought without bias or hierarchy, then consciously and kindly invite each one to leave. But my conduits need tuning. Therefore, I look. Everything counts as part of the experience of sculpture, and I am drawn to these works because, in their illusion of subtlety, they have taken on the enormity of the void. They have found a way to rein in the endlessness of space by parsing it out and exploring its borders. They ask: from how many perspectives can one view a single line? They take on the large and the small at once. If I could absorb their intelligence as a guide, they would teach me the laughable irrationality of linear time.

I am curious about the remainder: what is left behind, lost in this translation. These objects, no matter how formal, are always greater than the sum of their parts. I’d like to believe my writing is too. Added to the character of each is an accumulation of energy from the attempts that never came to be. Each one could have been, and forever still can be, something else. These dark-matter creations haunt me now because they make me feel the presence of my own multiplicities. The force of what could have been will always be greater than what is. All I can do is return to listen closely. I return to the hum. It is grounding, slightly magnetic, like the binaural beat of a meditation bowl or the rumble of an approaching storm. Perhaps this is the sound of burgeoning energy, and it forms the soundtrack to the moment just before I lean down, stick out my tongue, and slide it steadily along the edge of each form. I linger in the joints. I can’t help myself; I want to absorb their essence. They are strong and inquisitive, and they leave a fine layer of effervescent sweetness on my tongue. My methodical licking activates the release of a musky bloom of machine oil intertwined with human skin. As I pull slightly back, we face each other one last time, comparing lines up close, experiencing the gravitational pull of each other’s volume. If I am lucky, the impact of this experience will linger. These objects I once shared space with will stick with me, clinging to my insides as I reluctantly walk away.



This catalogue essay was originally published by The Power Plant in 2023 in conjunction with Jen Atiken’s exhibition The Same Thing Looks Different (23 June – 4 September 2023).

Images by Toni Hafkenschied

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