GALLERY 2
IN DEFENSE OF ONE OR MORE LOST CAUSE
NICKI WYNNYCHUK
Cinder blocks, bamboo, pieces of timber and plywood and other found objects, white paint and handmade ceramic bowls — these are the materials of Nicki Wynnychuk’s In Defence of one or more Lost Cause. This body of work is a motley and unlikely collection of political artworks — ‘unlikely’ because the political character of these assemblages is unapparent, but for the title of the work and its relationship with the balance of the artist’s oeuvre.
Two points of theoretical departure are unmistakable here. The first: Wynnychuk is professedly pursuing a “sustained investigation into the possibility of a sculptural translation of war theorist Herfried Münkler’s concept of a post-heroic society”. The second: Slavoj Žižek’s In Defense of Lost Causes, to which the title of the present body of work unambiguously refers. Common to both of these writers — and, I sense, to Wynnychuk too — is an unmistakable tenacity, an enduring belief in politics, an enduring belief in the importance of critique. Brad Haylock
