I make the familiar strange. I convolute images with many layers. I deconstruct and reconstruct common people & the places they live. I obstruct & mutate my paintings by projecting video onto their surfaces. I embrace uncertainty, impurity, & visual newness.
I think about the various modernist manifestos, their rebuttals of the status quo, and the continual rebirthing of how we paint. I think about beginnings & endings. My recent experimental body of work pollutes the painted surface by activating it with projected light. I hope to bring painting down to a human level where I attempt to breathe life into the paint, to encourage the painted figure to dance & move, to fill in the informational gaps & push painting closer to reality.
I'm fascinated by our ever growing relationship with the digital, and I use consumer-grade technology such as iPhones & home projectors in this work to mirror the integration of the analog & digital that I see in daily life. I'm interested in our short attention spans & what it might take to hold our gazes longer. I'm interested in the over-stimulated, over-exposed space that many of us live in, the digital landscape on full blast. I relish the ambiguity & tensions created while attempting to integrate 2 mediums, to make them seamlessly rely on each other's strengths in pursuit of newer, more dynamic images.
For me, this body of work is, in part, about light and light's importance to discovery & sight. I think of Prometheus, the myth of the cave, camera obscura & the lightbulb. I think of the television, the computer, the smartphone, and how our current digital landscape is a spectacle made possible by light. I am interested in the interplay & causality between painting, photography, film, video & animation- the starting point of each & how they can begin to blend back into each other.
EDUCATION
- University of Texas at Austin, Bachelor of Fine Arts, 2006
EXHIBITIONS
- 2020 Avril 2020, Video Consortium, Paris
- 2020 VR/Immersive Program, Red Sea International Film Festival Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
- 2020 New Frontier VR Cinema, Sundance Film Festival, Park City, UT
- 2019 Arrow of Time, Lazy Susan Gallery, New York, NY
- 2019 Peekskill Film Festival, Hudson Valley MOCA, Peekskill, NY
- 2019 Video Art Festival Turku, City Library of Turku, Turku, Finland
- 2019 Straight Through the Wall 2019, Projections in Brooklyn & Manhattan, NY
- 2018 Video Art Experimental Film Festival, Tribeca Film Center, New York, NY
- 2018 People On the News, Lazy Susan Gallery, New York, NY
- 2018 Straight Through the Wall, Projections in Brooklyn & Manhattan, NY
- 2017 Online Performance Art Festival, Live Stream Performance of "Most People: A Work in Progress"
- 2017 Marked Urgent: An Exhibition in Defense of Free Press, Ground Floor Gallery, Brooklyn
- 2016 Most People: A Work in Progress, Standard Toykraft, Brooklyn
- 2016 Video Art Experimental Film Festival, Tribeca Film Center, New York, NY
- 2016 Monkey Town 7, 111 W 21st St, Los Angeles
- 2016 Food For the Moon, Standard Toykraft, Brooklyn
- 2014 New Works by Eamon Conklin & Nic Koller, Gus Harper Studio, Los Angeles
- 2013 An Exhibition of Heather Anne Welch & Nic Koller, Monkspace, Los Angeles
CURATION
- 2020 VIDEOS FOR UNCERTAIN TIMES, Quarantine Mini-Playlist Series via Email
- 2019 STTW + VAFT, Curated from VAFT Program 2016-2019, Outdoor Screening in Dumbo, NY
- 2019 Straight Through the Wall 2019, 7 Outdoor Screenings throughout Brooklyn & Manhattan, NY
- 2018 STTW+ VAEFF, Curated from VAEFF's 2019 Program, Outdoor screening in Dumbo, NY
- 2018 STTW + XFR, Curated from the XFR Collective Archives, Outdoor screening in Gowanus, NY
- 2018 Lightyear 38: Straight Through the Wall, Outdoor Screening on Manhattan Bridge, NY
- 2017 Straight Through the Wall, 9 Outdoor Screenings throughout Brooklyn & Manhattan, NY
PRESS, PUBLICATIONS
- 2020 "Imagined Histories of Artists & their Parents" by Nic Koller, The New Yorker
- 2020 "Bianca Kennedy et Nic Koller apportent une touche d'esthétisme à la VR", Tracks - Arte TV
- 2020 "Field Notes: New Frontiers at Sundance Film Festival", Immerse
- 2020 "Sundance 2020 Dispatch: New Frontier Returns to its Non-Commercial Roots", ScreenAnarchy
- 2020 "Sundance Innovations: Extended Reality Takes a Leap Forward", No Film School
- 2020 "How to Make Yourself Useful to Our Future Robot Overlords" by Nic Koller, The New Yorker
- 2019 "Sundance's New Frontier announces works from 'ever changing' technology", Salt Lake Tribune
- 2019 "The Benefits of Being Between Jobs" by Nic Koller, The New Yorker
- 2019 "The Questions Constituents Want to Ask..." by Nic Koller, The New Yorker
- 2019 "Nic Koller: Memories distort, combine & simplify", Naked But Safe
- 2018 Create! Magazine featured in Selections by The Jealous Curator
- 2017 "Artist Creates Cubist Video Portraits", Prosthetic Knowledge
Email me:
hello@nickoller.com
- New Yorker Shouts Cartoons (2019-2020)
https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/nic-koller - Archived website (2018)
http://2018.nickoller.com/ - Themes, Soundscapes & Audio Collage (2014-2020)
https://soundcloud.com/nickoller - Building a Better Mask - Screensavers (2015)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8szgSI1gXlkHu-gc8cqFwGGgcV7Oy5rC - Video Experiments & Early Video Collage (2010 - 2014)
https://www.youtube.com/user/ZestTechnology/videos - Archived Opera - Dolphins! (2011)
https://nickoller.bandcamp.com/ - Archived Opera - Spring Light (2008)
https://nickoller.bandcamp.com/album/spring-light
