Physical Speculations on a Future State
Physical Speculations on a Future State; New Work by Nicholas Nyland
June 7- July 14, 2012 at Prole Drift, Seattle, WA
Nicholas Nyland’s work regularly references art historical or traditional craft sources to produce images or objects that tend to defy easy categorization and play with assumptions about the fine art object. The work included in this exhibition comprises a range of media - painted canvas, ceramics, and furniture that plays loosely with the precedents of Early American decorative art, and the early Modernist and Minimalist cannon.
The exhibition’s title is taken from a Victorian era book by two Scottish physicists (The Unseen Universe: or Physical Speculations on a Future State by Balfour Stewart and P. G. Tait, 1875) that sought to counter materialist theory by using physics of the day to make a case for the immortal. The popularization of science for ideological purpose continues today; as does it’s corollary, our desire to extrapolate meaning from what we observe in the world around us.
The complex identity of the work in the show is an opportunity to engage in physical speculations, painted propositions. The work is often about those very basic qualities and effects (color, form, gesture, materials, and style) that are often seen as a means to an end (representing an image) but whose operation in the apprehension of the object/image is complex and often contradictory. In seeking to pursue visually enigmatic or historically ambiguous forms, Nyland opens up a space for reconsidering where we draw the lines around painting, sculpture and other types of things.