Christopher Nitsche: Liminal Ship II

Mobile Museum of Art - Alabama

By Kevin Lee

There’s a dim hallway at the Mobile Museum of Art brightened by the colors of the inner life. Through one end is a children’s exhibit; through the other a show abounding with ancient toil and weathered textures. Between them is the journey we all share, thanks to the vision of artist Christopher Nitsche.

The work is Liminal Ship II, an installation in the museum’s slim Rodning Gallery until December 8, 2019. Built into a corridor wall, the 33-foot form is the latest in a series Nitsche was drawn to when he was in an environment far removed from aquatic life.

“We were living on six acres of high desert scrub in western New Mexico. We were around the 7,700-foot elevation within the San Mateo mountain range,” Nitsche said.

Now back at sea level as a professor at Georgia’s Savannah College of Art and Design, he has kept with the seafaring shapes. He’s built two others in the last year, at Savannah’s Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum where visitors walked through a 75-foot installation and at Jacksonville’s Alexander Brest Museum and Gallery.

Christopher Nitsche, LIMINAL SHIP II, lumber, wire, found objects, neon and LED lighting, total length: 33’ x 7’ x 3.’ Installation view at Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL, 2018 - 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

Nitsche finds the form as a “vessel” open to interpretation, a “carrier of things” both physical and spiritual. What’s in Mobile qualifies on both counts.

Life’s detritus litters the interior-alphabet blocks, toys, dolls, bottles, pottery, eyeglasses, computer parts, musical instruments, pottery shards, pencils, dental equipment-well worn, sometimes broken and suspended with sinewy black wire. The accouterments of womb and tomb gather at either end, never clear which is stem or stern. More than literal talismans, they’re clearly evocative.

A self-described “pack rat,” Nitsche scours flea markets and other sources for pieces that speak to him. What’s used here was already at hand.

“Most everything in there are previous accruals initially intended for other pieces, but repurposed for this,” Nitsche said.

The makeshift hull is clearly cobbled together from a variety of wood. Evocative of a Trojan horse, the short planks overlap but leave gaps to inventory the cargo.

The outer skin is courtesy of the ocean, too. He collected debris from hurricanes Matthew and Irma-”a lot of fencing and other household wood”-then finished with bits from a “lumber boneyard.”

Every breach and slit radiates a crimson glow. Sure, it’s the color of vitality, the signifier of life but the artist was more practical. He sought a dense, otherworldly tone he’s noticed from neon and LED.

“Liminality basically means ‘transition from the known to the unknown,’ so I wanted to create an ethereal unknown within that particular space,” Nitsche said.

The original plan was for a much larger work but that changed and for the better. In one of the museum’s more expansive galleries, the piece would have lost its sense of intimacy, something vital for what’s essentially so personal. Closer quarters are best, since pondering Nitsche’s ship turns the viewer’s mind inward to a manifest only they see.

(December 15, 2018 - December 8, 2019)

Kevin Lee has served as arts editor for the Mobile, Alabama newsweekly Lagniappe since 2003. He won Mobile Press Club awards for both Best Commentary Print and In-Depth Reporting for Non-Daily Newspaper in 2004 and 2005.

Filed Under: Reviews