Artist Registry
The White Columns Curated Artist Registry is an online platform for emerging and under-recognized artists to share images and information about their respective practices. The Registry seeks to create a context for artists who have yet to benefit from wider critical, curatorial or commercial support. To be eligible, artists cannot be affiliated with a commercial gallery in New York City.
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STATEMENT OF WORK
This current body of work began with a desire to peel back and look behind—to understand the materials that construct both physical spaces and the conceptual space of, for instance, the gallery. I started cutting into my paintings to reveal the wall behind. Then the wall itself became the medium.
As my understanding of the forces of disinvestment and planned neglect in Baltimore City grew, the vacant row house became an unignorable symbol and eventually site of intervention. Entering an empty building, I would remove a slab of drywall to my studio, etch an image of the facade into the gypsum, and eventually return it. This obviously futile act of repair was a vehicle to understand the condition Baltimore was in, and that I was in.
Last year, in what began as a pessimistic retreat from my socially oriented projects, I returned to my studio and to these pieces. Almost 15 years later, I am less interested in the self-reflexive gesture of my original process—the art as an artifact of the building. I’ve started to depict not only the building itself but the structures people have added to reinforce or reconstruct it: scaffolding, bracing, underpinning. These sincere, often failed, acts of repair or simple attention are evidence of a negotiated but enduring utopianism.
https://nicholasfwisniewski.com/about/