CANDACE NICOL

I grew up in Nevada, an environment of contradictions.  At home our familial bodies were objects of concealment, masses of possible shame that we hid from ourselves and each other.  Our bodies - the flesh and substance of our beings were not open for discussion or discovery, yet in public, especially the casinos where we often dined, scantly clad bodies (mostly women) were familiar territory, open to the public gaze.  Our parents did not acknowledge this contrast or help us understand the mixed messages, hoping that the issues of nudity in Nevada would be invisible. 

I chose the male nude as my subject matter in order to break apart my own preconceptions and misgivings about the body.  It is an indulgent undertaking but worthwhile in that it is the male body that is the most hidden.  Women have been taught to see themselves as something to be viewed.  As a result, they have neglected their own claim to gazing at the male body.

Postures and Parts, the Male Nude consists of large-scale digital prints of the male nude.  Photos of my husband and male friends are composed, manipulated, and enlarged in Photoshop, and then printed using an Epson 2200 pigment ink printer.  The printed images are cut and mounted on 8”x8” or 10”x10” frames.  These components are then reassembled along a grid format to suggest fragmentation and mapping of the body surface- a visual encoding of the mind gazing over hair, skin and fleshy mass.  The “gigantic men” seem to float between a layer of digital color and oil glaze, thinly sliced within a framework and ultimately trapped under a thin sheet of resin.  The largeness of scale and the layering of glazes and resin over the prints result in a vista of pleasure, defamiliarizing body parts and emphasizing contradictions to the idealized forms in Western culture.  There is an aspect of decoration in these pieces, a resulting characteristic of the grid flattening visual space and the repetition of color and value.  The choices in color relate intuitively to the terrain of Nevada –the contrast between the flat chalky browns of the desert, the formations of mountain ranges, and the bold neon pinks, yellows, and greens of Reno and Las Vegas.

There are elements of digital technology that run through Postures and Parts.  The constant grid suggests a relationship to digital encoding; the squares equating to binary codes - small pixels of information that can be easily converted and moved around. 

Biography:

 A Native Nevadan, Nicol has used the male figure, photographed and digitally manipulated, as a means of formulating a response to her experiences in Nevada’s often contradictory landscapes of desire. Nicol’s work has been described as a fusion between printmaking, painting, and digital photography.  As a result, Nicol’s multilayered compositions posit engaging questions to viewers regarding relationships, social identities, and societal issues surrounding the female gaze.

Candace Nicol currently works as Director of Oxbow Press, Nevada and is a co-founder of the Northern Nevada Printmakers’ Conspiracy.  She also teaches at Truckee Meadows Community College.  Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally and occupies such prestigious permanent collections as the Boise Art Museum, Corcoran College of Art and Design, Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper at Rutgers University, Southern Graphics Council Archives, The Kinsey Institute, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, and Painting and Sculpture Museum Association, Istanbul, Turkey.  She has been awarded the distinguished Nevada Arts Council 2009 Artist Fellowship and is a Sierra Arts 2008 Artist Grant recipient.  She has also been awarded an honorable mention in Printmaking Today, a review of fine art printmaking at the Dedalo Center for Contemporary Art, and the Castle of Castiglione Museum, Abruzzo, Italy.

Candace Nicol, USA

http://www.candacenicol.com