Lara Nickel
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Featured Artist:
Lara Nickel
About the Artist
My paintings are installation-based, depicting plants, animals, and objects that are representational, life-sized, and relate to the spaces they are in, much the way the subjects would do so in reality. The backgrounds are left white in order to mimic and emphasize the neutral gallery or museum wall. As a result, the subject of the painting is pushed forward into the room, making the room itself the setting of the painting. The gallery or museum is sort of like a zoo, with codes of conduct ensuring a safe and proper distance from a piece of art. Paintings sit and wait for people to come, as if they didn’t have anything better to do, and sometimes they don’t. But what is usually overlooked is how a painting exists in our world while existing in its own.
My work is just as much about how people perceive and experience plants, animals, and objects, as it is about how people perceive and experience traditional wall paintings. Painting has a lengthy and established history, full of expectations about how and where and what a painting should display. I am not trying to deny that paintings and walls depend on each other, or that a painting in some way shows an alternate reality which one can escape to. Rather, I am interested in the ways in which I can play with these limitations. A painting has physicality, a subtle three dimensionality within a space, and my work chooses not to ignore this fact. My paintings act more as objects (instead of as windows into other worlds), allowing viewers to experience a painting in relation to themselves.
The blur between the pictorial space of a painting vs. the lived space of the viewer is what keeps my paintings from becoming simply decoration and the wall simply a place to decorate. Instead, it lets the space activate the paintings and the paintings activate the space. Therefore it is not always effective or appropriate for a painting to proclaim itself, to state its presence at eye level, or to even be seen by anyone, as tradition would suggest. If a painting wants to hide in a corner under a table, I think you should let it.
BIO
Lara Nickel was born and raised in New Mexico. She received her BFA in painting with a focus on art history and theory from the College of Santa Fe. Lara’s work has been featured in galleries both at home and abroad, including exhibitions at the Ernesto Mayans Gallery, and Axle Contemporary in Santa Fe; and in L’Ilsle-sur-la-Sorgue, France.
Website: www.laranickel.com