studio spoken
– Kelly Worman, Painter and Curator.
Name: Nikki Nolan
Practice: New Media / Installation
Please give a brief bio. (Where are you from? How did you start? Is your background in art?)
I was born in Denver, Colorado. I have always been on the more creative side when it came to handling anything, and so my family, unlike many people I know, pushed me into making art. In undergrad I studied business for two years, because my family really wanted me to study art, and business seemed like the rebellious thing to do. However I didn’t find my studies interesting, so I took one art class, just to make my parents happy. The next day I switched my major to art. I graduated with a BFA in Sculpture and Photography, with a minor in Art History and Theatre. After undergrad I got an artist residency at a not for profit art gallery in Denver, and took a certificate class in web development at the Art Institute of Colorado. Then I applied for graduate school. I got into Pratt for photography, but felt a bit restricted, I transferred to the Digital art department, so I could learn more technologic skills, to add to what I knew. I graduated in December 2011, with my MFA in interactive media.
What continues to inspire you and keep you motivated in the studio?
I gather most of my inspiration from reading. I like to read a lot of books, and articles in a short period of time so I can form links between broader spectrums of information. Then I get to work creating objects and installations that come to the surface while I was reading.
How do you work physically?
I create drawings and then I link them together to form something that is conceptually interesting to me. Then I will go into Photoshop or Maya and make a mock up of the spatial construction that I formed in my head. Most of my work requires research into different method of execution since, the work is right now mostly digital, and technology is constantly changing.
What do you find frustrating/ enjoy about your process?
It’s incredibly frustrating to work digitally. I actually used to hate digital; I would only work in analogue forms, because it was much easier for my brain to understand the process. I dove into digital because I thought that I needed to understand this form that I had such anger towards. Now having studied the medium more thoroughly I understand the advantages and limitations more fully.
What I enjoy about the process is how challenging it becomes to create things, even if they appear simple. The consciousness that it takes for proper execution brings my brain to a more complex understanding of the digital world we live in. I feel the work I am creating is something that could only have been formed in the last five to ten years because computers just couldn’t process the amount of information we can throw at them today.
What is your medium/ media of choice? Why?
Right now I am working in the digital spectrum, most of my work is interactive media, mixed with digital photography and video. I have come to this medium because it seems as if it is what our society has chosen to surround itself with. Digital looks like the current medium and it still has so much room for growth and experimentation because we don’t have a formal language to talk about it. Artist like Joan Jonas and Dan Graham are extremely influential in my process and the mediums they work within is video, which is a digital format. However, I find drawing and making physical sculptures to be much more enjoyable of an experience.
How has your practice evolved over the years?
My early work was sculpture mixed with photography. I was exploring notions of identity; I was highly opposed to digital. When people created digital works I became highly critical of their methods of exploration. My early thoughts were formed before cameras in cell phones were a norm. Over time I read a lot, which formed my ideas and found methods that conveyed those ideas. Which took me to a place where I wanted to explore the process of the human brain and its relationship to the external world. I am right now working on exploration of human memory in relationship to video and photography. I see these mediums becoming more influential on memory than actual experiences.
Tell us about your creative and conceptual process. Where do your ideas come from/relate to?
My work falls into a conceptual territory: the aesthetic emerges from an organic, real-time process of creation rather than any staged attempt to control or manufacture a predetermined set of emotions and reactions. With my work I try to incorporate ideas from both the late 1960’s and 70’s video artists Andy Warhol, Joan Jonas, Vito Acconci, and Dan Graham, as well as our contemporary culture of Ipad and smart phones.
In my work I am trying to explore our new brain, which has emerged—because of the invention of the Internet, video, and digital photography—through visual arts. My work has become a network of images linked and interwoven, leading, non-linearly—from one show to the next. Every new installation has fragments from previous shows, manifested in prints and objects, carried over and situated in a new context. This is my attempt of mirroring our mode of integrating new experiences and observing the associative connections that arise regardless of their relevance to authenticity.
Who/ what motivates and influences your work and why?
My inspiration comes from a lot of different places, mostly writer and scientist. However, the initial exposure to most of the writers and scientists came from the podcast Radio Lab. I started listing to the show online, back in 2007. The first episode I heard was about memory, called Memory and Forgetting. During the episodes they talked to scientists Joe LeDoux, Karim Nader, Oliver Sacks, Eric Kandel, and Elizabeth Loftus along with Dan Ariely.
Jonah Lehrer has been the main influence into why I continue to make art. In Lehrer’s book, Proust Was A Neuroscientist, he makes the argument for the arts and how it gives a dynamic and more reflective description of the world, both internally and externally, through the non-formulation of exploration.
I wanted to explore this notion of artist explorations of the world and of the different mediums that interest me. Joan Jonas created a video piece called Left Side Right Side (1972), which allowed her to gain a better understanding of the medium of video and its spatial distortion, which happens because of the immediacy of the medium. She watched herself on a TV monitor and was trying to draw on her face using the TV as a mirror; this caused her to have spatial distortion of where she was located in space.
Another work Boomerang (1974), a video piece made by the collaboration of Richard Serra and Nancy Holt, exposed a similar medium disorientation. As Nancy Holts is trying to explain her experience of listening to herself talk, in head phones, with a slight delay, she become confused and unable to effectively communicate because she becomes almost trapped in her own words. As Holts states in the video piece, “ The words forming in my mind are somewhat detached from my normal thinking process. I have the feeling that, I am not where I am. I feel that this place is removed from reality, although it is a reality already removed from the normal reality. The words keep tumbling out of me because I want to hear my words, I want to hear them pouring back in on top of me.” Those words almost seem like a poem, but they were formed live while she was trying to explain her experience that was happening, which became nearly impossible.
I believe these early video artists tapped into an extremely profound awareness of the digital immediate medium, and their deliberate exploration now guides and inspires further experimentation in digital photography, video and the Internet.
Real life situations that inspire you?
The content stems from a few places, one being the first time I remember being documented, which prompted a sensation of self-doubt as to whether I was recalling my own experience or had substituted a detached replication of the event, after I had viewed the photographs of the experience. As Sontag writes, “Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events…After the event has ended, the picture will still, exist, conferring on the event a kind of immortality (and importance) it would never otherwise have enjoyed.”
The immediate availability of digital photos and video via ubiquitous internet access and cell phone cameras creates a constantly updated stream of information which daily outperforms our fragile human memory in both scale and accuracy. Our pursuit thereof is challenged both by our limited potential to understand and our expanding capacity to digitally record. We align and adapt our understanding of the event – yielding to and assimilating the impartial record. My installations demonstrate the alienating effects of this process in microcosm.
How do you think/ want people to respond to your work?
I want people to be challenged in a way that allows them to make new connections. I try to (non-forcefully) lead the observer into a heighten awareness of themselves and their own relationship to the technological world. We our so bombarded by media, these days, that it becomes hard to think clearly, I tried to make spaces where people can be both immersed in technological landscape but have the control to think more clearly by not giving them so much information that they become overwhelmed.
What was the last show you saw that knocked your socks off?
They are few and far between, but last years Christian Boltanski, showed No Man’s Land at Park Avenue Armory. Beyond words. I felt a deep sadness for how much loss there has been in the world. I spent almost the entire day at the exhibit, which made me question my own existence.
Current adventures/ future plans? What’s next?
I just graduated, and I am waiting to hear back on some artist residencies for next year. I am also looking for a new studio space. Right now I have been working out of my apartment, which is restricting. I have also changed modes and plan on creating more sculptural work to adjust to this new transition of not being in school for the first time since I was five years old.