Featuring: Nikki Painter (Richmond, Virginia)
Friday, February 6, 2015 | 6P – 9P
Curated by: Alya Poplawsky & Katy Bakker
As a graduate student, Nikki Painter was drawn to demolition sites; fascinated by forms of deconstruction. Through her drawing studies on-site she realized that like any living being, architectural structures went through a natural life cycle. A structure is created, then it starts to deteriorate via natural causes, it is then demolished, and a new structure is created. Painter illustrates this in her work through the juxtaposition of color and pattern. Grays, blacks, and whites represent a standing architectural structure. As nature starts to encroach, color, organic shapes, and patterns start to filter into the composition representing nature. Painter’s patterning, be it checkered, diamond, hatching, or repetitive geometric shapes represents the quiet chaos in nature.
Painter plays with the viewer’s perception of reality. Within her drawings she creates complex spaces by using confusing combinations of linear perspective, overlapping, and transparency. She likes to work with different materials including collage, gouache, watercolor, acrylic paint, ink, pencil, colored pencil, and pen in order to explore their effect on mood and perspective.
Her small "dimensional drawings" or shadow box pieces serve as a means to experiment with potential large-scale installation ideas. Within these pieces, she uses various types of materials, scale, perspective, and copious patterning to create intense mini-worlds.
Inherent in her compositions is a battle between representation and abstraction, destruction and creation, structure and organic shapes, non-objective arrangements of color and pattern and architectural formality. All these juxtapositions coexist in Painter’s universes.
Nikki Painter received her Studio Art MFA from American University in 2009 and her Painting and Printmaking BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2002 and her Studio Art MFA from American University in 2009. She is currently an Adjunct Instructor at the Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia in Space Research. Painter just completed an artist residency at the Jentel Foundation in Banner, WY and has won awards including the Mellon Research Grant and the Wolpoff Purchase Award. Her solo exhibitions include shows at Civilian Art Projects in Washington, D.C. and at COOP, an artist-run space in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has also been shown at SCOPE Miami, X- Initiative’s “No Soul for Sale” in New York, the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, and in the publication New American Paintings.