Out of the Ordinary

Aaron Falk

Los Angeles-based sculptor Patrick Nickell works with plastic and string, plywood and cardboard, tin cans and occasionally bubble wrap – and over the course of his 20-year career, he says his art has been called a lot of things.

“Someone’s always going to say ‘The throw-away sculptures of Patrick Nickell,’ or ‘The ephemeral Patrick Nickell,'” he said. “I let people say what they want to say, but the Home Depot thing is getting a little annoying.”

Nickell, whose works will be on display at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art through Dec. 5, said, while some of his sculptures may seem to be decaying, his art has been able to stand the test of time, thus far.

“There are pieces in the show that are over 20 years old,” Nickell, 44, said. “So, all these works that everyone assumed were disintegrating are fine.”

Combining materials some may find rudimentary or crude, Nickell said, his pieces create an unfamiliar sense of volume and a depiction of how space is occupied.

“How can a line be very thin, instead of being large and massive, but still have a sense of volume and space without it just being a line,” Nickell said. “We need to understand that things can be unfamiliar, but we have to have the skills, the tools and the willingness to enter that world on some level.”

The museum’s education curator, Jay Heuman, said Nickell – tin cans and all – has been able to depict volume in art the way painter Jackson Pollock depicted velocity.

“The materials are not complicated,” Heuman said. “So, it all hinges on [Nickell’s] own creativity. He’s taken these sort of very usual materials and done some pretty unusual things.”

During the opening of Nickell’s first solo exhibition, “Built for Speed (A Sculpture Survey),” students at the museum had different opinions of his work.

“A lot of it looks like [work from] a level-1 3D class,” Missy Aimes, a senior majoring in art education said, “like he went through his garbage and glued things together.”

“It’s something I haven’t really seen before,” Halee Rogers, a sophomore majoring in sculpture said. “He utilizes the materials very well. He also has a play on light and transparency that I really enjoy.”

Still, other students, like Brian Dewey, a biology sophomore agreed more with Aimes.

“I guess he’s trying to make a statement -or something,” Dewey said, “I think everyone has the right to be creative, but I honestly don’t know how they classify what art is.”

Enrolling at Linfield College in McMinnville, Ore., as a political science major, Nickell was turned on to a ceramics class by an adviser and made what, he said, was a natural transition into art.

“Clay’s a very friendly medium,” Nickell said. “It’s really hard to screw up.”

But Nickell said he wasn’t satisfied with basic ceramics and, instead, needed to add paint to his work.

“I wasn’t able to be satisfied with the form itself,” Nickell said of his largely organic, early sculptures. “I had to be able to decorate it. I had to give it a skin. I had to do something to it to get it to a point in time where I was satisfied with some sense of identification.”

After graduating from Linfield, Nickell attended graduate school at Claremont Graduate School in California. There he said problems with the department’s kiln led to his work exploding and a need for a new direction – a direction, he said, he found in cardboard and masking tape.

“In a very conscious way I was seizing the opportunity to move forward,” he said. “I was extending my forming vocabulary and not just going backward to ceramics.”

Nickell soon moved into a studio in Los Angeles where, he said, the amount of space he had to work with pushed him to larger-scale sculptures.

“When you have big space, you make big work,” Nickell said of one piece – a circa 1989, untitled, 92-by-42-by-24 inch, plywood “V” covered with cardboard.

“These pieces are basically in reaction to those pieces that are more maximal, or a lot-going-on-type works. I really wanted to reduce and reduce and reduce. I really wanted the cardboard to have greater emphasis as opposed to a way to just sort of complete the sense of enclosure. The cardboard now was to become a sort of predominant or dominant element within the way we would identify a three-dimensional form.”

A change of venue to Pleasant View, Colo., forced Nickell to downsize his work again, he said, and also made it necessary to look for new materials.

“What’s happening now is I’m using plastic a little more and felt marker – and then bubble wrap,” Nickell said. “And now the methodology has changed because I’m not using a hammer, nails and a jigsaw – now I’m using a single-edged razor blade. So the idea is that the process is becoming more familiar, the process is coming outward to the audience as opposed to this magic, fabricational, ‘how did he do it?’ idea that some sculptors embrace.”

Nickell’s latest pieces are a collection of pink, some organic, some angular shapes, he said, which depict volume through lines.

“Now I have to decide where I go from there,” Nickell said. “It’s a body of work I could probably do for a while and some people want that. It’s nice to give people what they want sometimes.”

While “Built for Speed” is Nickell’s first solo show, his work has been featured in group exhibitions in Laguna Beach, Calif., Sheboygan, Wis., Seattle, and Claremont, Calif.

The Luckman Fine Arts Gallery at California State University, and the Pasadena Art Alliance organized Nickell’s exhibit. The Marie Eccles Caine Foundation and the Utah Arts Council have provided local support.

“Without appropriate financial support we’d never be able to do something like this,” Heuman said. “Here we are on a major university campus in Utah. Where hopefully we’re having an intellectual life that transcends the immediate locale.”

At the conclusion of the exhibition, the show will travel to the University of Texas, San Antonio.

-acf@cc.usu.edu