Take a map, fold it together once, twice, and you will find, mysterious mechanism, Brazil directly neighbouring China, Alaska next to New Zeeland. Or: Take a flight around the world, passing the time zones, chasing twilight, and you will find the day of departure doubled by arrival. Where have the past twelve hours gone? They are hermetically hidden in a time warp, in a crease of time and space, a transitory path, philosophical jet-lag. 'A glade', said Heidegger, 'A fold', Deleuze replied. Distance is no longer correlating to terms of time and route in this model of eternal moving without arriving anywhere, a paradox. The fix points of starting and destination are abrogated, confused.

Nikkole Huss uses the refined and complex folding technique in her artwork shown in the exhibition PATTERNS OF FLIGHT at Gallery Uno, The Fine Arts Building Chicago. Paper planes are covering a foil, a page with coherent letters, words and phrases, a map, a literary littoral with adumbrations of islands, contours of continents traced in pale blue meanders.

Through the energetic act of folding, plane pages are transformed into three-dimensional paper planes, texture is converted to structure. Fissures result. Matters of space and sense are altered, concentrated. Fragments of text visible on the aero foils allude to the existence of the missing links, concealed in the fold, an invisible and secret life in the dark, excluded from perception, source of irritation. And: Estimations, leading to incertitude, to floating without footing.

The floating of this erratic air fleet of paper planes bends the straight trajectory, the line, into an ornamental loop, a curve. Lost in endless motion, a circuit without destination, they describe both actual state of travelling and philosophical attempts, facing a world looped in permanent transit, in between.

The prefix trans- and inter- is predominating today's vocabulary, communication is indispensable. But does it really work?

The curve being the preliminary state of every fold recurs in Nikkole Huss' paintings and drawings. In 'Dialects decoded' curling bands (Möbius strips? Magnetic tapes?) are winding and whooshing all over the canvas, decoding or enciphering language? The noise is the signal, the differentiation of single information complicated. The irritation is accomplished in front of a series of 'Alphabets', marvellously scrolled letters, but calligraphy without sense, pure signs of confusion. Or are we able to recognize meaning and significance by unfolding, by deconvolving the curves and folds and thus perceive the letter's, the world's entity, as the german philosopher Leibniz recommended?

NIKKOLE HUSS is american artist based in Chicago.

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