NICHOLAS CHEVELDAVE! Selected Press

‘Big City Dreaming’Tank Magazine, 16 December 2019

The collages of Nicholas Cheveldave’s Big City Dreaming, published by Everyday Press, set the motivational platitudes of capitalist realism – dis-embodied assurances of discounts and secure contracts – against the vicious realities they prom-ise relief from. Cut-outs from free London commut-er newspapers that espouse domestic aspiration are placed alongside absurd found imagery – bird nests, wasp hives, sheds – all alluding to the inhos-pitality of the urban environment. While they call attention to the grim realities of the housing crisis, Cheveldave’s collages are also at times extremely funny. Against the fake friendliness of landlords and letting agents, they create an occasion for common laughter among all who have endured the cruelties of Britain’s neo-feudal housing market. With Big City Dreaming, Cheveldave thwarts the unregulated, unfeeling capitalist structures that dismantle the right to a home.

Naomi Rea and Nate Freeman, ‘7 Emerging Artists to Watch at FIACand Its Edgier Sister Fair, the Paris Internationale’

artnet, 17 October 2019 [extract]

For art lovers looking to make discoveries in Paristhis week, FIAC has a strong showing of emerginggalleries in an upstairs wing of the Grand Palais. But if you’re looking to swap out the VIP lounge fora Vape lounge—literally, one of the project spacesis also an e-cigarette store—the Paris Internation-ale is a suitable alternative.

While FIAC’s Lafayette section does offer gen-erously subsidized booths (the Lafayette Group coughs up half the cost), the selection remains tight, with room for just 10 galleries. For collectors hoping to make discoveries on the lower end of the market, the younger fair offers a wider range to choose from, with 42 galleries making a showing in 2019. The nonprofit fair, which is free to visit, is now in its fifth edition, and is spread across four floors of a Hausmannian mansion a 20-minute walk away from the Grand Palais.

Nicholas Cheveldave at Emalin

Who: Cheveldave’s collages deal with information taken primarily from commuter newspapers, which rely on advertizing revenue to survive. He interro-gates the commodity of empty space, and his workoften adopts the floral and flamboyant language ofluxury residential developers, which sell a lifestyleand identity alongside their product. Images of nests—and evocations of urban sprawl, overcrowd-ing, and gentrification—pervade the work.

Based in: London, UK

On View: Paris Internationale

Why You Should Pay Attention: Cheveldave stud-ied with the Turner Prize-winner Mark Leckey, andhas been with Emalin since he graduated fromGoldsmiths in London. His work is in the collec-tions of the Kistefos Museum and Sculpture Parkin Norway and Beth Rudin DeWoody’s collection.

What to Look Out For: A series of small collageworks are on view at the fair.

Prices: The prices for his work generally fall under€10,000. The smaller collages at the fair werepriced at €1,600, although his larger works oncanvas and paintings on Dibond range from about€5,000 to €8,000.

Up Next: Cheveldave’s work will be exhibited atEmalin as part of Condo London in January.

‘Editors Pick: Friend of a Friend 2019’Blok, 19 April 2019 [extract]

“Friend of a Friend” is a gallery–share initiative launched in 2018 with editions in Warsaw and Berlin. This year’s Warsaw edition involves nine most-active galleries based in Poland’s capital, who will share their exhibition spaces with sixteen international gallery guests. Here’s our selection of the ten most interesting artists taking part in the event.

Nicholas Cheveldave (Emalin, London) and Isaac Lythgoe at Piktogram. In Isaac Lythgoe’s objects dreams and the subconscious create temporal and fictional distortions. Lythgoe works in various media, his practise considers consciousness and its distortions through storytelling. Isaac Lythg-oe graduated from the Royal College of Art, lives and works in London. Canadian artist Nicholas Cheveldave’s practice engages the ways in which the image economy of Western consumer culture generates and controls both an understanding and the communication of identity.

Krzysztof Kosciuczuk, ‘As ‘Friend of a Friend’ opens in Warsaw, We pick the Shows to See’�Frieze, 05 April 2019�;EXTRACT=

This coming weekend marks the opening of Friend of a Friend in Warsaw, a gallery-share initiative that originated in 2018 as a collaboration between Warsaw galleries Stereo and Wschód. The second edition of Friend of a Friend will see 16 interna-tional galleries present works at nine of the city’s commercial spaces. Here, frieze contributing editor Krzysztof Kosciuczuk provides a glimpse of what’s in store.

Piktogram hosting Emalin (London) and Park View/Paul Soto (Los Angeles/Brussels). 06 - 27 April 2019

Piktogram hosts Park View/Paul Soto (Los Angeles/Brussels), who will bring a set of painterly works by Kate Spencer Stewart and Aidan Koch. The gallery also shares its space with London’s Emalin, showing Nicholas Cheveldave, whose work juggles text, painting, photography, sculpture and 3D rendering in order to explore the modern economy of images, their echoing and circulation. The exhibition also stages an unlikely reunion between Cheveldave and Isaac Lythgoe, who used to share a studio in London. For Friend of a Friend, Lythgoe has revised several older works, in which quotes from a fantasy universe, eerie flowers and bone structures are illuminated with artificial light and play a part in an oneiric narrative woven by the artist.

Field of Plastic Flowers, the artist Nicholas Cheveldave’s latest solo exhibition, took place athis gallery Emalin in Shoreditch, London. Thisground zero for a relentless millennial pursuit forauthenticity—where the interiors of expensiveretail spaces are clad with found timber and renderings of new high-end condominium towersdisplay graffiti on their facades—appeared to bethe ideal setting for his work. Separated only bythe enveloping perimeter of the white cube, theworks on view appeared to feed off of the DIYand craft aesthetic of the surrounding neighborhood while coupling it with a more sinister tone. The gallery’s central space was occupied by alarge installation: resting on a wooden deck weremetal beer-kegs welded on top of each other tofunction as resonators for an ambient 7-channelaudio piece, produced in collaboration withthe artist’s brother, musician Hunter Cheveldave.The wall-based works, made from photolaminate,paper and wood, fused flat picture planeswith sculptural objects. While some took on abstract organic shapes, others resembled functional objects such as fences, birdhouses aswell as cat scratch-toys, and were populated byphotographs, newspaper cutouts, nails, blankprice tags, band-aids, name patches and friendshipbracelets, among other things.

What lies at the core of these works is the artist’sinterest in the circulation and containment of images: the way they gain personal significationand their function in the process of the formationof identity and its commodification. Bluntlyspeaking, the attempt to establish a legibility inour personal lives—not only for ourselves but also for the gaze of others—against a ubiquitouscondition of image and information overload andthe endless availability of variations of consumer-ist and lifestyle choices. As Cheveldave employsa multitude of techniques and processesranging from photography, painting and 3D render-ing to sculpture and text, modes of collecting,assembling and packaging become boththe subject matter of the works as well as theirmaterial. The artist develops an ecology in whichan array of references, forms and ideas are

channeled through different media and bodiesof works only to reappear over and over again incollage-like arrangements. What they share is acertain quality as containers, vessels, and dwell-ings, both in a figurative as well as literal sense.

Large collections of found and personal imagesthat Cheveldave gathers constitute the point ofdeparture. These are amassed not through pro-found research, but deliberately represent thefirst results of an online search. Amateur snap-shots are organized into different groupings de-picting seemingly banal scenes of everyday lifeand domestic spaces: from attics under construc-tion, front lawns, rows of self-storage unitsand laminates shelves in supermarkets to anoverflowing restaurant table or images of clouds.At times they are left untreated and under layersof photolaminate attached directly onto canvasor the surfaces of his sculptures like in FamilyFun Times – DIY I (2017). Other times, he subjectsthem to a laborious and technically sophisticatedprocess whereby he feeds them into the3D rendering software Maya. Popular among devel-opers of computer games and animators in the film industry, the software allows him to “virtually”rephotograph the images through amorphousglass forms that he models himself. Theresults—distorted reflections of the original pic-tures that appear to be melting or flowing—areoften collaged with cutouts from newspapers,which in turn seem overly analogue, adding adated appearance that conflicts with the digitallygenerated imagery. Furthermore, when Cheveldavecovers the sculptural works with a myriadof nails that remain devoid of any true structuralfunction or engraves metal beer-kegs with a sys-tem of archaic-looking signs, he seems to explicitlyplay on the fetish for individual physical laborand its traces, both of which are intrinsic to DIYand craft culture. Here it is precisely a gesture ofpersonal manifesting or mark-making that mightindicate more than a demarcation of space andproperty. It can be read as a desperate attemptto inscribe meaning onto the objects that surroundus. This is also echoed in the artist’s use of friend-ship bracelets to weave webs across his

Lennart Wolff, ‘Nicholas Cheveldave’CURA, February 2018, pp. 239 - 243

collages as well as the frequent application offabric nametags that bear the genderless pseudo-nym “Frankie,” both of which appear throughoutseveral bodies of work.

What links Cheveldave’s mimicry of the amateur-ish products of self-realization with his interest inimage regimes is the role both play in a conditionthat Boris Groys described as an urge for the de-sign of the self: the way we design ourselves aswell as the way the world designs us. Hence in apresent of ubiquitous and instant image produc-tion, fuelled by the Internet and social media, weare eventually not only forced to take on aestheticresponsibility for the objects we accumulateand surround ourselves with, but also for the images that we choose to represent us.

What is bound up with the notion of design is itsfunction to act as a sort of “concealment:” enhancing seduction and eradicating all unpleas-ant realities. Though in turn, it drives a hauntingsuspicion that there’s something lurking behindthe polished surfaces—if not sinister, at leastdirty and messy. The artist readily provides uswith those cracks in the surface, as the imageshe uses display the back-side of domestic idylls:overgrown and cluttered backyards, self-buildhome brewing devices with questionable sanitarystandards and interior spaces that are unfinishedand caught up in states of renovation. All these point to possible narratives of misfortuneand economic despair, that nevertheless remainblurry. When contemplating Cheveldave’sworks, one realizes that instead of allowing usa true insight, we encounter nothing behind thesurface other than yet another surface, leavingus to question the static order between interiorand exterior, front and back as well as whatwe consider natural and artificial. Followingthe thinking of the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion,what lies at the core of the works is a tensionbetween container and contained. In “ContainerModel,” Bion writes about the psychotic mind’sdependency on a “splitting of all that part of thepersonality that is concerned with awareness ofinternal and external reality, and the expulsion

of all these fragments so that they enter into orengulf their objects.”1 What Cheveldave’s worksseem to imply is that this condition has becomea collective one. A recent text by the artist himselftitled Probational Locked-In Syndrome(PLIS), which revolves around the fictitious reportof “Frankie’s” psychological conditions,might read as drawing on a similar idea, wherebyhe envisions a future in which “the instinctualneed to embellish one’s image is now a naturalway to reflect to a public. There is no physicalunderstanding left, only the most bespoke andhyper-considered self-reflections have been putout for a public to digest. Spontaneity is redundantand no longer a thing of this earth.”

1. Wilfred Bion, The differentiation of the psychotic from the non-psychotic personal-ities (1957), in E. Bott Spillius (ed.), Melanie Klein Today: Developments in theory and practice, volume 1: Mainly Theory (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 61.

1. External Revolution Phase II, 2017 (detail); 2. Family Fun Times - DIY I, 2017 (detail); 3. You Can’t Put your Arms Around a Memory PART 4, 2017 (detail); 4. Around a Memory PART I, 2017 (detail)

David Jenal, ‘Watchlist. Künstler, die uns aufgefallen sind: Nicholas Cheveldave.’ Monopol, Nr. 12/2017, pp. 32

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W A T C H L I S T

Nicholas Cheveldave wurde 1984 in Victoria, Kanada geboren. Er wird vertreten von der Londoner Galerie Emalin

LINKSNicholas Cheveldave „You Can’t Put your Arms

Around a Memory PART 2“, 2017

MITTE„Part-Time Dreamer – 28 Reasons to

Defer Reality“, 2017

RECHTS„Internal Re-Development

Phase“, 2017

Künstler, die uns aufgefallen sind:

Nicholas Cheveldave

Grobes Holz, verschweißte Bierfässer, in Ein-machgläsern gärendes Obst und rostige Nägel: Auf den ersten Blick scheint es, als sei Nicho-las Cheveldave ein nerdiger Materialfetischist, der den Keller seines Großvaters ausgeräumt und übermütig zu Kunst erklärt hat. Doch die Collagen, die der Kanadier gekonnt zwischen zusammengenagelten Hölzern (oder auch mal auf großflächigen Leinwän-den) platziert, sind lustig zugespitzte Abbilder westlicher Realitäten, inklusive Kitsch und Spießigkeit. Die Aufnahmen, die Cheveldave mit seinen Materialstudien verwebt, zeigen Teenager, Häuser, Gärten, Zäune, Mikrowel-len, Kunstrasen und Plastikmöbel. Es geht um Abgrenzung und Markierung, Eigentum, Szenecodes und Oberflächlichkeit. Die Oberflächlichkeit äußert sich vor allem in einem gläsern-glänzenden Look, den der Künstler seinen Collagen mittels eines 3-D-Programms verpasst. Die behäbige Geste des Sammelns und Zusammenstellens wirkt bei Cheveldave plötzlich zeitgemäß und digital, und die Collagen werden in ihrer Post-Inter-net-Ästhetik zu einem radikalen Gegenpol zur blechernen Industrieromantik, von der sie umgeben sind.

Der 33-Jährige machte 2014 seinen Abschluss bei Videokünstler Mark Leckey an der Gold-smiths University in London, wo er heute lebt und arbeitet. Im Rahmen seiner zweiten Ein-zelausstellung in der Londoner Galerie Ema-lin zeigte er in diesem Herbst eine gewaltige Soundinstallation, seine bisher größte Arbeit: In ausgemusterten, metallenen Bierfässern installierte er sieben Lautsprecher. Jeder von ihnen wird separat angesteuert und mit düsteren, von seinem Bruder arrangierten Kompositionen bespielt. Die Fässer selbst hat Cheveldave zuvor mit einem Schweißge-rät „tätowiert“, wie er sagt. Die Motive: Krebs, Pentagramm, Dreieck.Es sind die basalen Fragen nach Identität und Zugehörigkeit, die Cheveldave um-treiben. Seine Arbeiten sind Ausdruck eines tiefen Wunsches nach Echtheit und Originalität, nach Dreidimensionalität und Haptik, ausgelöst durch die glühende Digi-talität der Großstädte. Gleichzeitig ist diese Digitalität, in der Kitsch und Glanz plötz-lich Avantgarde und Symbole nur noch rein ästhetische Grafiken sind, Bedingung für die Kunst von Nicholas Cheveldave. David Jenal

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Nicholas wears cashmere overcoat, merino crew neck + slim fit jeans all DUNHILL, shoes his own

Nicholas Cheveldave’s artworks have titles like Too Much Body to Burn – THE HONEY DRIP and Personality Deformer (THE_HIPPIE_NOIR). He’s Canadian but has been in London for years and is represented by Emalin, the ultra now gallery that’s a skip away from members club Shoreditch House in East London. His practice combines painting, collage, assemblage, sculpture, sound, 3D printing and digital imagery to make works that explore banality, aspiration, consumerism, decay, post-Reagan problematics and internet-in-stigated identity crises. Yes, all that and yet more.

Cheveldave has shown in the best of the new gen of commercial gal-leries in Stockholm, New York, Olso, Milan and Vancouver, but also with the blue chip giant White Cube and established London-based gallery Herald Street. Artforum has written about him, everyone is talking about him..

What are they saying? Well, he moved here to do the prestigious MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths in 2012. In Canada, he went to the Emily Carr Uni-versity of Art and Design (Douglas Coupland is an alumni), shared a street with Jeff Wall’s studio. At Goldsmiths, he was taught by cerebrally brilliant British artists Mark Leckey and Simon Martin.

Already, you might be thinking you have totally figured this man out. Vancouver... Goldsmiths... Coupland... Leckey! This brief biography speaks so loudly. Vancouver gave its name to the ‘Vancouver School’ of Photo Con-ceptualism, which included art greats like Jeff Wall and Rodney Graham. Goldsmiths was the incubator for the YBA generation of Damien Hirst, Liam Gillick, Gillian Wearing, Sarah Lucas et al. Douglas Coupland defined Gen-eration X in his first novel of the same name, published in 1991. And Mark Leckey won the Turner Prize in 2008 with work including a lecture that fea-tured a clip from The Simpsons in which Homer is turned into a 3-dimen-sional being (he is also a contributor, nay a corner stone, of this magazine.)

Maybe some of our inclinations about what kind of artist Cheveldave might be are right… And yet maybe they’re not…

We are so adept now at deciding who someone is and what they stand for based on the images and texts - acting as cultural pointers - that they choose to convey, we absorb and digest them in the split-second atten-tion spans of social media addicts (and aren’t we all, especially in art world.. This is one of the subjects of Cheveldave’s work. Having studied critical the-ory as well as art practice at Emily Carr, he deploys an intellectual rigour to explore in depth what might be called ‘identity in the digital age.’

Sitting in Emalin gallery, where his exhibition Field of Plastic Flowers (his second show at the space) runs until November, we talked about the suburbs, insulation systems, cats, beer, goods pallets and more…

LKM: Who were your formative tutors when you were studying?NC: I had a couple of great theory tutors in Vancouver - Patrik Andersson and Shep Steiner. At Goldsmiths, more media heavy artists – I studied under Simon Martin and Mark Leckey. Mark was always honest in his opinions!

LKM: What did you talk about? NC: We talked a lot about ways to absorb information and then reflect it. How to mediate it I guess - mediate experience through reflections. How to take things that we deal with subjectively and translate them, through objects and ideas and images, to become something else, which is kind of almost a distanced reflection of yourself but a different form of it. A lot of my work is about the surpluses of information and images over the Internet which allow us to pick the ones which fit our desired identity the closest. And then to continuously rejuvenate new images to make an identity to reflect to a public, that might not be genuinely you, but it’s what you want to perfectly put together and translate. That’s pretty much what my work deals with. I play a lot with discarded images.

LKM: Are those ever pictures given to you by people you know? NC: I have an archive of 5-7000 images that I’ve put together slowly, that are just from everywhere. Some are mine, some are from social media, most are from totally accessible databases of images on the Internet. Having that access to other people’s lives online is kind of scary.

LKM: What filters do you apply to select the images? Are they all quite suburban like these ones?

NC: Yeah a lot of them are. A lot of it’s domestic. And a lot of the images are of spaces that are uninhabitable – inside storage units, a place where there is the potential to fit someone’s entire life - all the things they’ve accumulat-ed. Spaces like attics that are lined with insulation, which someone needs in order for their home to feel comfortable, but are considered incredibly ugly and supposed to be forgotten about. Or images of buildings during

moments of renovation, that capture that in-between state.LKM: Do you have a personal relationship to this subject?

NC: I grew up in the suburbs and my home in North Vancouver was totally like these pictures. People often say my work feels very North American too.

LKM: What are these weird structures made of wood and nails, at-tached to the panels? They’re like architectural models or someone’s DIY project.

NC: They’re supposed to be cat toys. But cat-proof. LKM: Why the nails?

NC: That’s what makes them cat proof.LKM: Do you have cats?

NC: No, I’m allergic to them but I do like them. It’s supposed to be about displacement, similar to how with a fence someone’s territory is marked off. A pet cat is something that people feel needs them in order to survive. They care for the cat, but they also take ownership of it. It’s a bit like when people knock down trees in their garden and then put up these tiny birdhouses to try and get the birds to come back. I’ve made birdhouses in this show, too...

LKM: The assemblage approach of your work in this show seems to relate a little to Johns and especially Rauschenberg’s combines?

NC: Yeah, I’ve been dealing a lot more with sculpture recently too. Lots of the material I have collected in my studio is just from the streets of London – material discarded at renovation sites, where people are re-beautifying their apartments. So my work is made from material that had a different ‘life’ or function before it was taken by me to use to make art.

LKM: It doesn’t have that utopian quality of transformation though. NC: No, I tend to think there’s a really dark and destructive aspect to con-sumerism really. A lot of it’s about a huge need to generate new things all the time and the massive amount of detritus that’s left behind from that.

LKM: What are these huge metal column-like structures made from? NC: From beer kegs! Vessels used to transport liquids that are for consump-tion – particular liquids that allow you to get yourself drunk, mediate your personality and enjoy time with people. Or alone at home like an alcoholic. These kegs are really interchangeable. It doesn’t really matter which one a pub gives back to the wholesaler.

LKM: And the graffiti on the kegs?NC: It’s mostly appropriated. It’s meant to look kind of like scarring. Or de-marcations of time. I’ve drawn on an old hobo code for a safe place to sleep, for example. These codes were used a lot by train jumpers in America be-tween the 50s and 80s. It’s a code or rhetoric. The idea for this work began with a trip to see the hoodoos in the Canadian Badlands. Over about 100,000 years the wind has eroded these stones and they have become massive columns in the middle of the desert. They kind of whistle in the wind, which is amazing. In this piece of work, the kegs I’ve used are all that’s left after the pleasure of what was inside them has been consumed.

LKM: Which artists do you especially like? NC: Lutz Bacher. I saw her show at the ICA and it was so together but also disparate. She’s one of the best. I really like Jack Goldstein – his art but also his records. I grew up around a lot of Photo Conceptualism. I love Rodney Graham’s piece where he lobbed potatoes at a gong and made a bottle of vodka out of the potatoes.

LKM: So what’s the sound that is playing here in the gallery? NC: It’s a 7-channel audio that my brother, Hunter Cheveldave, made. Each column has a separate speaker hanging inside it, playing one of the chan-nels. Hunter is a Royal Conservatory pianist who’s released like 7 techno al-bums. For this work with me, he’s taken samples from industrial generators and air conditioning systems and then used a modulation synth to mess with them and create a half-hour industrial drone composition.

LKM: Are these plasters stuck to your work? NC: Yeah. To cover up trauma and to heal. This is the only colour of plaster you can buy in the UK – pink skin tone. In other parts of the world you can get darker ones to match the skin tones. In Brazil the plasters are darker…

LKM: I’m reminded of Dan Graham’s Homes for America (1965-67)... I guess you know that work?

NC That’s so on key! It’s one of my favourite artworks. What he did was to re-duce suburbia down to minimal rhetoric - talking just literally about its con-struction, its size. He dehumanised it – and commented on what it meant for families to move out to suburbia. I really like artists who can convey ideas through different outputs. So, yes, Dan Graham’s kind of a hero for me.Nicholas wears beige cashmere coat DUNHILL

Nicholas at work wearing his own clothes; Opposite: Cashmere houndstooth car coat, merino crew neck + indigo casual trousers all DUNHILL

Model: Nicholas Cheveldave, Photography Assistance Jodie Herbage + Yoann Olawinski, Fashion Assistance Joe Palmer, Production Shiny Projects

Matteo Mottin, ‘Interview with Nicholas Cheveldave Emalin, Milano.’ATP Diary, 26 April 2015

The Dreaded Barista is “the espresso connoisseur, the know-it-all, who reminds you that three cups of coffee a day is probably destroying your liver... I would never think about my liver unless I am re-minded that it exists inside of me”

On April 8 inaugurated The Mortician’s Athlete and the Dreaded Barista, solo show by Nicholas Cheveldave curated by EMALIN (Leopold Thun and Jasmine Picot-Chapman). The artist’s new body of work takes as its point of departure aspects of con-temporary “café culture” and blends it with various forms of mundane life.

Matteo Mottin in conversation with Nicholas Cheveldave.

Matteo Mottin: Can you introduce me to your art-works? In all of them we see in the background an organ of the body and bar items in the foreground

Nicholas Cheveldave: The body organ in the back-ground is spray painted, on top of it I put a 3D print with bar items. Everything around the organ is white, and the 3D print is clear plastic, so the canvas itself is lighting the print, everything is activated by the painting underneath. What sur-round them is a kind of objects obtained with a 3D rendering program, like coffee cups and vessels. It’s about an object that becomes bodily, and the flow is kinda like a figure through the space. And there is also photos of fetishized objects within the barista culture. It’s basically about choosing some-thing. Before was golf, now we have the barista, afterwards I’ll probably do another one. But this is about this kind of sub-genre I’m not exactly part of, and I don’t understand properly, but it’s about taking images from that culture and use them. I wouldn’t say it’s abuse, it’s just taking things with-out properly understanding them. Images like that are all over social media quite often.

MM: The paintings in the show are displayed in a wide, well illuminated open space, then there is a small, darkened room. Is it dark because the inside of our bodies is also dark?

NC: Exactly. It’s basically really white, really per-fect objects, and then there’s this other side, dark, grim and dirty. That’s the actual physical rep-resentation of it. There’s also a cup, which has the same geometry of the cup printed on the paintings, and I had it 3D printed, so it’s physically present as a piece along with the dirty things we got on the in-side. You never think about your liver until you drink so many beers and you’re like “oh my God”. And there’s also the idea of the Mortician’s Athlete, a really great 1918 pre-dada poem by Francis Picabia. I love the flow of it. It’s linear and makes sense, but at the same time it jumped around and talks about incredible things. It even references coffee. At the center of this room there’s a quite hard and solid object. It’s made of plaster and I spray-painted it.

MM: Which kind of body part is it?

NC: It’s nothing. It’s kind of an amorphous. It’s like the organs, with their references to the body, but it’s not specific. It doesn’t have a face, it doesn’t have hands, it doesn’t have genitals, it’s not male or female, it’s very androgynous.

MM: What about the dreads on the sculpture?

NC: They’re made out of wool. They’re felt. They were made by this person called The Traveling Pixie, in the North of England. (laughs) They’re fantastic, they’re really nice quality. It’s related to something that could be seen as Post-shaman-ism, or Anti-shamanism. A shaman is someone who learns so much about something and tries to become it, to understand it. But now I think a lot of times people would try to change something to suit that. So it’s like taking things and making them yours, opposed to taking time to understand something, and understanding the wholeness of it. It’s like doing not enough research.

MM: That’s the reason of the posters and the altar in the room.

NC: Yes. It’s also fetishization. The fetish of the cup, the object, the tactility, the touch. And also

when you walk in the room you can feel something crunchy beneath your feet. It’s trying to make an at-mosphere on you, really. But it works more or less like an archive.

MM: So, this is a series of paintings about the body parts, in particular about the organs, and you’re making a connection between what’s outside of the body that has to go on the inside. You’re also making a comparison between shamanism and new age culture, as something that’s both on the outside and on the inside of the body. What kind of experiences led you to make this exhibition?

NC: A lot of it I think it’s being, and being part of it as well. I don’t think this is irony or anything like that. It surrounds me, and I’m part of it, and this is my own way of digesting it and try to figure out how I fit into this place or how I can understand a little bit more through this. Taking images of these things that exist around me and filtering them out by putting them through my own body, trying to categorize a little bit for myself. I finished my studies and Goldsmiths, and I studied with Mark Leckey. He talks a lot about this idea of mediation. To really understand something you have to look at it so much and distance yourself, and try to look at yourself through reflection. I just thought that it was so true. You know, you can never step back and look at yourself unless you put yourself out there enough to look at you. So I was trying to do that, and put my art out there was kinda a little intense and a little too much. And I was kinda, “let’s see how it goes”, because I didn’t know how this would turn out until I made it.

MM: And you’re doing this with something very common, like a cup of coffee.

NC: I like the pop culture references as well. I think there’s no longer an outside artist, or out-side culture, because with the availability of the informations on the internet something always comes to light. 50 years ago it would take 20 years to something to come in the culture, but as soon as it’s on the internet many people see it and it becomes a meme, it becomes a pop cultures of

themes, and people blend it. So, in that regard, I thought that using things that were very mundane, regular, everyday things, would become the best way opposed to try to find something that was the next weirdest, strangest thing.