Nick Naber

BASH PIECES

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Drawing on the breadth of philosophical language surrounding architecture in what can be considered our current “panoptic” era–from penitentiaries to once-imagined Modernist, utopian corporate or urban landscapes–my work envisions unimaginable, heterotopic environments rendered in watercolor and pencil. Recurring and repeating abstract and geometric forms, divorced from their contexts and functions, are recomposed through relationships of pattern, perspective, scale, and color to conjure likenesses of unreadable maps, city plans, and civic spaces, exposing the hierarchy of structures which intersect and organize imagined space in an age of alienation.

My work is concerned with the means through which architecture can address the body in ways that regulate social and psychological inclusion, exclusion, and observation and that expose systems of visual control. I draw on a history of architectural representations as, on one hand, tools of power and, on the other, as models for utopia, through an investigation of imagined environments informed by comprehensive investigations of art and philosophy. 

The base structure of my drawings can be understood as modular. Each module, which alludes to a structure, repeats to create patterns while breaks in the repetition and in perspective of the modules create disorientation, instability, and unease. Through the creation of impossible perspectives alongside the reduction of scale in my imagined cityscapes, I critique the power of architectural design and the often latent, unconscious effects on those who encounter it. Having become accustomed to the sights of skyscrapers, and the layouts of densely constructed cities, it is often difficult to recognize them immediately as symbols of power and control or even metaphors for unshakeable faith in progress, something these drawings expose. Additionally, my use of often saturated and heterogeneous color creates a substantial juxtaposition between the hard-edge of my modular structures and the soft, fluidity of the medium of watercolor, causing further dislocation.