Ange Nolan

Selected exhibitions
2025
PsyChic
2024
Contrast Fluid (solo)
Sundrome
2023
Mudslide
Canary in the Mineshaft
Then Sharply Turns
2022
VCA Grad Show (Honours)
2021
VCA Grad Show
2020
Cage Installation
I haven’t mentioned orange yet

Writing
Photo

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Canary in the Mineshaft at TCB Gallery with Charlie Robert, Alanna Paxton, Caeylen Fenelon-Norris and Jacob Sturgeon

Installation view of Canary in the Mineshaft, documentation by Jordan Halsall, 2023.

Installation view of Canary in the Mineshaft, 2023.

Paris is Heaven, ink on canvas, 80 x 120 cm, 2023.

Untitled collaborative piece with Charlie Robert, ink, tea towels, dimensions variable, 2023.

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• Canary in the mineshaft alludes to the live birds brought down into coal mines to test the toxicity of the air. The canaries’ higher sensitivity to carbon monoxide and subsequent collapse afforded miners early warning to evacuate the tunnels. Although this practice was abandoned in the eighties, the proverb remains in use in the contemporary, interchangeably predicating other atmospheres of toxicity and perception. Observing the frailty of the canary as a locus or interface between the proverbial known and unknown, forms a basis to question how and through what means we can really know our times.
  
  Within the context of this exhibition, the possibility and position of the image as object and formal material is posited as being progressively more complex, flippantly teetering on the edges of ambivalence. Ways of seeing in the contemporary shift between the real and virtual, blurring the lines of perceptual experience and manifesting in altered states of hyperreality.
  
  As users and artists what do we send before us into the frontlines? How might an artwork or series of artworks serve as a visible/viable point of mediation, as the canary, between artist and world. Which interests falter and prostrate, which ones endure?