I sat in the last row of the bus, watching the scenery dissolve into dusk, each passing moment echoing the temporal experience I’d just had in Marlon Kroll’s exhibition Cold Open at Unit 17, a small, community-oriented gallery. The shifting light outside mirrored the way time unraveled within the white walls of the gallery—a space whose architectural character, defined by three unobtrusive windows through which daylight seeps in unevenly, seems uniquely responsive to Vancouver’s mercurial weather patterns. As I rode, I wondered: Does the exhibition remain the same in the evening, under the stark fluorescents that line the gallery’s ceiling, as it does in the diffuse glow of a rainy afternoon?
Throughout Cold Open, Kroll struck a measured balance between the material presence of his sculptures and ephemeral gestures, an approach that blurred the boundaries between object and environment. In this way, the artist affirms that the gallery is never a neutral container but an active participant in meaning-making. Kroll, who is based in Montreal, has been exhibiting primarily in Canadian cities since the mid to late 2010s, often in smaller, intimately scaled galleries that accommodate the atmospheric sensitivities of his installations. Unit 17 altered, and was altered by, the works it held. Kroll writes in the exhibition statement that “every story has already begun before we’ve even looked on,” a sentiment that echoes an idea underscored by his work: that to engage with art is not just to observe but to be implicated in its unfolding, to be, like the coffee stains he employs, absorbed into the work’s slow, accretive unfolding.
Marlon Kroll, Tremendous potential, 2024, pine, manila paper, hide glue, trumpet, sheet music, label sleeve & enclosed contents. Courtesy the artist and Unit 17 (Vancouver). Documentation by NK Photo.
The exhibition’s spatial choreography began with Tremendous Potential (2024), a nearly eight-foot-tall work positioned at the gallery’s threshold—neither fully obstructing passage nor casually welcoming it. This liminal placement required an immediate negotiation between visitor and object. The work itself—layered sheets of aged manila paper adhered to wooden panels—stood like a veil between public and private worlds. Up close, the surface reveals coffee stains forming patterns around faint numerical sequences, while an actual trumpet emerges from the top of the work, nodding to Kroll’s familial ties to music. (Kroll, who was born in Germany into a family of psychics and musicians, often incorporates biographical detail.) What was most striking, however, was the work’s arrested potential. While Tremendous Potential carries the suggestion of intended movement—its vertical orientation and layered structure evoking a door, something poised to swing open—it occupies a state of permanent pause. This sense of suspension seemed deliberate, inviting viewers to linger in the tension between what is and what might have been. In its stationary state, the work seemed to gather the room’s shifting light and air more tightly around it, deepening its quiet entanglement with space.
The gallery’s main gallery opened from this threshold encounter, revealing a careful orchestration of objects whose hybrid forms and quiet presence resisted immediate classification. Deeper in, An Antenna Tuned to You (2024) announced itself through sound before it was fully visible. The work—a modified ceiling fan whose blades rotate at a measured pace—creates a metronomic pulse as each blade strikes the pull chain of an antique brass lamp. Installed on the floor, the lamp had a white egg where the bulb should be, transforming the utilitarian into something uncanny. This gentle collision of the mechanical and mystical achieved a subdued surrealism that felt more Dorothea Tanning than Salvador Dalí—a dream logic that whispers rather than shouts. In Kroll’s work, surrealism emerges not through spectacle but through atmosphere: a soft distortion of the everyday that tilts perception without shattering it. The hypnotic rhythm of the fan’s slow, repetitive tapping against the lamp’s chain suffused the room, filling the space with a quiet, absorbing pulse. Familiar features—the modest dimensions of the object, the uneven light filtering through narrow windows—began to shimmer slightly out of phase, as if breathing in time with the fan’s slow, hypnotic rhythm. In this environment, viewers were gently ushered out of the role of observers and into a slowed, dreamlike state, where material and atmosphere, object and space, coalesced into a single breathing field.
View of Marlon Kroll’s Cold Open. Courtesy the artist and Unit 17 (Vancouver). Documentation by NK Photo.
Across Cold Open, Kroll’s installations did not simply occupy space; they breathed with it, stretched against it, and dissolved gently into it. Rather than offering fixed narratives or symbols, Kroll left viewers suspended within spaces that felt both intimate and expansive, provisional yet absorbing. This permeability between artwork and environment raises new questions as Cold Open prepares to travel to Toronto, where some of its pieces will be featured in a September group show at Cooper Cole—in a converted industrial building with lofted ceilings and open sightlines. (The Toronto exhibition was previously scheduled for May, but has been pushed back, and will now remain open during Art Toronto.) The presentation will include the same sculptures from the Vancouver version, with the introduction of a few delicately layered wall-based drawings. Kroll’s works will appear alongside pieces by Ella Gonzales and Gabi Dao, two artists represented by Unit 17, which organized this second iteration. Gonzales uses fabric and lacework to ethereal effect, while Dao creates quiet and layered installations. How might the spectral, atmospheric sensitivities that flourished in Unit 17’s intimate, mist-lit space transform within an environment shaped by harder angles and broader light? If the shifting light and compressed dimensions in the Vancouver gallery encouraged Kroll’s installations to breathe and drift, the Toronto space may cast them in sharper relief—emphasizing structure over aura, stillness over dissolution. Yet it is precisely this sensitivity to context, this quiet responsiveness to site and weather, that gives Kroll’s work its resonant power—a power that, like Chinese poet Hai Zi’s vision of time, hovers between the black earth of the past and the silent air of the future, dissolving the present into something porous and continually unfolding.
