Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik

Art Lot is pleased to present Diurnal, a solo exhibition by Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik.

“Dragonflies are diurnal; when a total solar eclipse occurs, they begin to fly back to their nests, turning back to their hunting grounds only once the obstruction passes.

There’s a unit of time at play here that’s difficult to pin down. For us, however, our second changed in 1967: once calculated as a fraction of a solar day—one of approximately 86,400 equal units—it became something else entirely: a particular multiple of reliably timed ‘vibrations’ that Cesium-133 oscillates at in its base state, 9,192,631,770. The gap that emerged from this astronomic/atomic discrepancy resulted in the need for a stop-gap: the leap second, with 1972 marking the introduction of two seconds followed by 25 further additions between 1973 and 2016 in an effort to make up for lost time.

Time slipping is not so unfamiliar though, even on less celestial scales: the circadian rhythm becomes its own system of one time sliding on the surfaces of other slippery times. The 1976 introduction of the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire (MEQ) by researchers James A. Horne and Olov Östberg attempted to provide a tool for analyzing one’s own circadian rhythm, a self-reporting test meant to approximate the more accurate (but correspondingly intensive) method of monitoring which consists of measuring salivary/plasma melatonin levels and core body temperature at different times of the day.

In Diurnal, a series of modulated and approximated systems reframe the way a public enters and navigates the empty lot turned sculpture garden on Columbia Street. Loeppky-Kolesnik’s exhibition consists of three sculptures: an underground manifold dispersing smoke from four vents embedded in the ground, an array of three LED- floodlights filtered by kiln-formed black glass panels turned compound eyes—each imprinted with 12 depressions mimicking ommatidia, the insectile lenses that compose the compound eyes of arthropods such as insects and crustaceans—and a reconstruction or speculative pseudo- ruin of concrete and steel originally designed for a garden by Gertrude Jekyll, both materially impregnated with iron oxide—the compound that gives hemoglobin proteins in blood a reddish hue—and shaped as a human-scale blood vessel turned landscape design.

Pinning systems to each other often introduces this sort of inaccuracy, something that gets smoothed over with a smear, maybe a suture—something rebranded as a system in its own right. ‘Morningness’ morphs the solar/atomic dichotomy into a trichotomy, measuring the time of an uncountable number of seconds, ones that might or might not be experienced between the bats of an eyelash.”

—Coco Klockner

Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik (b. 1988) is an artist from Montreal based in Los Angeles. They work in sculpture, installation, public art, and video, creating experiences that tell stories about ecological survival, speculative fiction, the queer body, personal relationships, and sense of place. Recent exhibitions of their work have taken place at SculptureCenter (New York), The Canary Test (Los Angeles), Mountains (Berlin), Honor Fraser Gallery (Los Angeles), Sophie Tappeiner (Vienna), Lantz’scher Skulpturenpark (Dusseldorf), Skol arts actuels (Montreal), Bass & Reiner (San Francisco), and the ONE Archives (Los Angeles). They hold an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, USA), and a BFA in Intermedia from Concordia University (Montreal). Their work has been supported by the Dedalus Foundation, Canada Council for the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Center for Cultural Innovation, les Fonds de recherche du Québec–Société et culture, and the Hnatyshyn Foundation. In 2024 they will open a new land art project in the Hudson Valley commissioned by the Black Cube Museum.