Kristi Malakoff

If you don’t look up as you enter Touchstones Nelson’s expansive Gallery A, you might not notice 21,000 menacing paper bees in a corner near the ceiling. It’s Kristi Malakoff’s famous Resting Swarm. Across the room, however, is a swarm that is unavoidable. Swarm, 6,000 butterflies—copied photographs on acetate—occupies one wall and parts of two others. The butterfly swarm rises in its stunning variety much like the career of this still-young but internationally exhibited BC artist.

“The Golden Bell” dazzles with virtuosity and use of materials—mostly paper, subversively repurposed. The exhibit includes 16 works from the past five years that evoke ideas of ascension and transformation. Curator Deborah Thompson’s learned statement and Robin Laurence’s elucidating essay expand on the breadth of Malakoff’s endeavour in the catalogue that accompanies the exhibit. The insect pieces reflect interest in swarm theory concerning the collective behaviour of decentralized intelligence. Dichotomies of nature and culture are at the heart of Malakoff’s practice. Her ethos and experience as a former forester and development worker in Africa anchor the fragility of her art with knowledge and contemplation.

Taking up most of one wall is the “Polyhedra Series” (five sculptures made of paper money) and the “Stamp Series.” They are in a row of nine acrylic, wall-mounted boxes. None of the currency sculptures is larger than three inches in any dimension. Canadian Star Ball, an exquisite soccer ball made from two Canadian five-dollar bills, is one of the pieces fashioned by modular origami. Iraqi Bloom, one of two flower sculptures, is made from three Iraqi dinar bills cut and folded in traditional Japanese kusudama. Purely delightful geometry.

The sculptures made from stamps include dancers and a bike rider as well as two tiny dioramas (a city and a fairy ring) cut out of German stamps from the GDR regime and Bundesrepublik. Delicate precision cutting puts the stamps’ intended propaganda into acute relief. Details such as worms in the fairy ring and a biker’s water bottle seem even more marvellous when you learn that most of the cutting is done without benefit of eyeglasses, let alone a magnifying glass, and except for inside curves that demand a scalpel, she uses big, orange-handled scissors.

Malakoff’s refashioning of symbolic papers, currency and stamps brings scrutiny to links between the church and money, among other things, associated in our culture with heaven and hell. Across the room from the “Polyhedra Series” is The Golden Bell, the title piece. This miniature diorama of church, steeple with golden bell and cemetery is made entirely from one Canadian $100 bill, cut and folded. The title comes from a line in a Grateful Dead song St Stephen: “Wishing well with a golden bell, bucket hanging clear to hell,…” Stephen, the first Christian martyr, warned his attackers about killing their prophets. Malakoff’s vatic visuals approach the sublime.

An untitled, eight-foot high, nine inches in diameter tower of breakfast cereal is startling. The tower’s construction took two and half months of 13-to-16 hour days. It turns out Fruit Loops are not a uniform size and it’s hard to make a straight tower with them. An arguable symbol of nutritional travesty, Fruit Loops-as-art eloquently contains dichotomies of East and West, nutrition and poison, them and us.

Maibaum, an installation and the largest piece, made of black paper and foam core, is exhaustive in its inception and execution. Half of Maibaum is shown, anchoring the exhibition with its commanding 18-foot maypole and 10 of the original 20 life-size children dancing, holding paper ribbon and dressed in Victorian style. After thorough research, Malakoff made costumes for 20 children, photographed them dancing around the maypole, then constructed the pieces, which faithfully represent the event. What appear to be flat silhouettes of dancers are, upon closer inspection, actually textured with exquisite patterns of cut-paper layers. The shadows cast by children, ribbons and birds flying above them suggest Plato’s cave of archetypes. Malakoff transforms a symbol of spring with innocence in the foreground and cultural depth in the literal and figurative background. ❚

“Kristi Malakoff: The Golden Bell” was exhibited at Touchstones Nelson in Nelson, BC, from June 22 to September 12, 2010.

Susan Andrews Grace is a writer and visual artist living in Nelson, BC.