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Artist Statement:
Pat "Tric" Nelson is a queer artist, motivated by intersectionality of identity, the politics of noticing, and material experimentation. (Including gender, queerness, poverty, ability/disability, and class)
The transmission of information is fraught with disconnections. Trying to impart our perceptions of reality to others can feel futile at times. We see things as we expect them to be. The peripheries of society, disparities between groups of people, distribution of and access to resources, system failures - such as with the world financial market - all become unseen until the ramifications demand we wake up from our assumptions.
Interruptions create moments when realities get crossed and layered and meaning becomes confounded. It is this interruption - a glitch or failure - which creates a pause that allows us to connect, notice and re-evaluate.
My body of work investigates the way we experience space, objects and our surroundings, attempting to bring light to what goes unnoticed in our environment. Influenced by my roots - being born in the Midwest and spending most of my youth in the Deep South - I am autobiographically motivated, while exploring broader issues of the use of space and the politics of noticing. I am drawn to decay, disrepair, the overlap of the industrial over domestic space, the intersection of technology, the found and the handmade, and conflicting materials and images that reflect the breakdown in contemporary society.
Pat "Tric" Nelson is a queer artist, motivated by intersectionality of identity, the politics of noticing, and material experimentation. (Including gender, queerness, poverty, ability/disability, and class)
The transmission of information is fraught with disconnections. Trying to impart our perceptions of reality to others can feel futile at times. We see things as we expect them to be. The peripheries of society, disparities between groups of people, distribution of and access to resources, system failures - such as with the world financial market - all become unseen until the ramifications demand we wake up from our assumptions.
Interruptions create moments when realities get crossed and layered and meaning becomes confounded. It is this interruption - a glitch or failure - which creates a pause that allows us to connect, notice and re-evaluate.
My body of work investigates the way we experience space, objects and our surroundings, attempting to bring light to what goes unnoticed in our environment. Influenced by my roots - being born in the Midwest and spending most of my youth in the Deep South - I am autobiographically motivated, while exploring broader issues of the use of space and the politics of noticing. I am drawn to decay, disrepair, the overlap of the industrial over domestic space, the intersection of technology, the found and the handmade, and conflicting materials and images that reflect the breakdown in contemporary society.
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Work Statements:
These works encourage you to consider Small Choices- find out more, interact, make small commitments at Twitter @smallchoices. |
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of our own design
We live, we consume and we see the results all around us. The repercussions reverberate around the world. We live surrounded by real need. We confuse our want with need. We live in excess and see the residue of the excess on the streets, scarring nature and pervading our towns, especially amongst those who have less. At the end of the day, we live in a world we choose, surrounded by broken beauty, in world created-of our own design. |
pe·riph·er·al:
of secondary or minor importance; marginal importance. A small figure is installed in a bed of resin with the remains of our small daily decisions. Each day we make small choices. Often overwhelmed when face-to-face with global issues, inundated with images too appalling to allow our minds to linger with-- we move forward. About half the world lives in poverty. About 15 million children in the United States – 21% of all children, live in poverty (according to the National Center for Children in Poverty). We think poverty, we think other. And we continue to make small choices. Each day. Real consequences. 7 Billion people. Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, explains that faced with too many choices, people opt to over simplify the problem, make bad choices, or simply refuse to choose--choosing instead to do nothing. 7 Billion people. Making small choices. Or not. |
Diffusion: Installation
Right now, in developing countries, such as Ghana, rural China, and areas of rural South Asia, children are desperately sifting through our old IPods, Computers, and other E-Waste to find small amounts of copper and gold, amongst plastic, ceramic and silicone computer boards and hand held devices, that can be sold for what we would consider an inconceivably small amount of money. Women sit in clouds of chemicals, burning away the plastics that hold these valuable materials. The risk to their health, water supply and futures are immeasurable. The United States is one of the few developed nations where shipping our E-Waste in large shipping containers, from the numerous “recycling” centers where we ignorantly and trustingly take our old electronics, is virtually without penalty. In Diffusion, delicate, fractured waifs of ceramic are fused to wire and tipped in copper an gold luster, and are suspended in the environment. Shadowy images of children in toxic play will be projected onto the ceramic and filtered onto the wall behind them. Viewers are invited to walk into the environment, becoming part of the piece as the projection covers their bodies and their shadows join the projection on the wall, at once with and apart from the children so desperately sorting through our old electronics. |
White Noise: Installation
Sitting in a train station in downtown Budapest, I look up. I see large ceramic insulators hanging between the power lines above the train. Beautiful, massive and utterly invisible to most people carrying on business beneath them, I sit and stare. These could be sculptures in a gallery or museum. They could be monuments to some long since forgotten political figure or war. Nobody sees them. They are white noise on the visual platform that we all share. Spaces, objects, and people all become static in our visual landscape. Their significance alludes us. We are focused on where we are going, who we are meeting, what is next on our agenda. We forget to see the things around us. We forget that there is a world beyond what is next on our list. We forget to notice how that world impacts us. Like two lines that never intersect we become a continuous missed connection. We look but we don’t see. We listen but we don’t hear. Our peripheries become background “noise.” We make assumptions based on information that was available to us that we didn’t take in-couldn’t take in. Our ability to process input is limited. Our perceptions become shadowed by assumptions that we, in vain, try to communicate to others. The transmission of information is fraught with disconnections. Trying to impart our perceptions of reality to others can feel futile at times. Interruptions create moments when realities get crossed a layered and meaning becomes confounded. It is this interruption which creates a pause that allows us to connect. At the core of the transmission of resources and information communication is the ceramic insulator, facilitating connectivity--the transmission of resources from one point to another. In this work, the ceramics insulator object is revisited, reevaluated, re-contextualized, and presented in an installation supported by projection and video through which the viewer can confront the object situationally. |