Nic Wilson
Biography
Nic Wilson lives and works on Treaty Four land in Regina (Canada). The artist and writer graduated with an MFA from the University of Regina, Treaty Four Territory in 2019. He has shown his work across Canada and internationally, and was the recipient of a SSHRC (Social Science and Humanities Research Council) graduate fellowship in 2017. His work is often about the way that objects, words, and actions can become portals to different times, people, and places. These portals are ruptures, cracks and holes that can be material, allegorical, or metaphysical. These passageways are often inflected by the queer experience, which leads to alternative perceptions of time and language.
About the artwork
For the performance He loves me, the main action is sitting at a table and picking one by one the petals off of chrysanthemums, tulips, and roses for five hours. As the audience members enter the space, the artist briefly pauses to acknowledge them with eye contact.
Inspired by the childhood game “loves me, loves me not” (a form of divination to see if the object of our affection returns our interest), this performance echoes with queer people trying to find an indirect way of checking if desire is reciprocated. Indeed, it is linked to safety issues, the fear of rejection, or even worse, violence or humiliation. This work is inevitably about time that can be valued as useful or wasted. In the heteronormative context, the time that is spent pining for love is typically regarded as wasted and childish. However, that may only be what queer people have access to. The duration of this performance is a love letter to this “wasted” time.
Artworks by the artist
