Sharon Harper

We walk into a room and displace air. We hardly notice. In Nicole Belle’s photographs we feel the outline of the air, and of the walls that contain the air. She performs a conversation with the halls and walls that surround her everyday, with the space between the refrigerator and the wall, with the hollow under the table, with the corner behind the bookshelf and figures out how they, together with her body, shape identity. All of the stuff that surrounds her is suddenly rife with more metaphors than a session with a shrink. She joins the rich history of performance art that preserves brave and small, significant acts of physicality with do-it-yourself documentation. Here photography is a quiet record bearing witness to quotidian acts that form identity, verifying self and other. Her at home yogic-practice—the toe reaching high in a handstand to hold a window blind in place—holds us in place, shows us the delights of connecting to our surroundings with unexpected, quirky grace.