Nick Parker is not a hoarder. Nick Parker keeps everything. If these two statements seem inherently at odds, that’s all right. The Brooklyn-based artist has a way with contradictions, a knack for making ideas coalesce when, taken at face value, they shouldn’t.
Parker’s work exists in the space between interpretation and intention, straddling the line between its own finished object-hood and its narrative as a work in progress — or, in the artist’s own parlance, its moment of utility versus its actualization as an art object. A graduate of The Cooper Union School of Art, Parker has been working steadily since 2009 to refine a materials-driven, process-based approach to making. His vases are composed of cement that he pigments, layers, and sands until it starts to resemble some hyperactive version of linoleum. His grander ideas typically end up as “paintings,” made from paint and paint-like materials embedded with scraps and layered on top of a substrate, then sanded down. Forty of those were on display at his last solo show, Amerigo Ferrari: The Golden Body [of America]’s Last Meal’s Lobster Bisque,for which he had some 150 to choose from, all stored at home. “They really stack up,” he says. That home, for the time being, is an East Williamsburg apartment that reflects the constant churning of ideas that defines Parker’s practice, in which he seeks out value in that which is discarded, done, or spent. He utilizes scraps from his day job as a woodworker as well as offcuts and donations from neighboring artists and makers. It could seem a bit relentless if Parker weren’t so methodical in his execution, so fluidly dedicated to his craft that it hardly seems like work at all, just the constant iterating and reiterating of a nagging suspicion that maybe there’s more to the material world than meets the eye.
“I like to keep things around,” says Parker, whose live-work space presents its own set of unique challenges to the creative process. “There are more limitations this way, which is kind of good.”
Parker hand-crafted all of the shelving in his space. “In general, I don’t buy any art supplies,” he notes, instead using found supplies and mixing his own pigments. In Parker’s world, everything from powdered iron, mahogany dust, tape shavings, the cut-off heads of nails, and spray paint chips act as “paint.”
“I wouldn’t put things away if I had space,” admits Parker, who keeps a tarp on the floor to catch cement and chips of paint, which he refers to as “offcuts.” They’re all usable materials and Parker likes them to remain visible in his work.
Parker’s raw material. His materials-driven process has evolved over the years. “[At one point] I was building differently dyed or pigmented layers of cement scraps and other ‘inclusions’ onto bottles or cans, and then sanding and cutting them down and polishing the layers. I then moved on to using the same process on a styrofoam form that is later dissolved. The difference is that in the earlier vases there is a bottle or can embedded within the cement, whereas later it’s just made of cement, usually sealed inside with wax.”
Parker started out building cement into bottles and cans, but moved away from that “substrate” and now does freestanding creations carved from molds. Concrete is not supposed to hold water but he seals it with wax to make the vessels functional.
A Perrier bottle, which could have been a potential found “core” for a vessel, stands amongst finished vases.
Aluminum offcuts from a CNC router salvaged from Parker’s day job — he works at a shop that does window displays — sit atop his desk.
A jumble of “string” in one corner reveals itself upon closer inspection to be ¼-inch lines of masking tape in a rainbow gradient. The Aloe plant is carved out of blue foam (not an artwork); next to it sits a carved foam “sandwich” wrapped in a piece of tinfoil painted with the American flag, exhibited in Parker’s 2014 solo show at Old Room, “Amerigo Ferrari: The Golden Body [of America]’s Last Meal’s Lobster Bisque.”
A live Aloe plant in one corner of the space (named Ezra Pound) acts as an artful foil to its blue foam cousin (The Ghost of Ezra Pound.)
“The things that I’m working on are all connected, and it becomes apparent when they’re grouped together.”
“They’re just kind of hanging out there,” says Parker of his tools—none of which he actually uses.
Parker has always been incorporating “things” into his work that don’t necessarily belong and aren’t traditionally used in the way that he uses them; a lamp shade Parker made of epoxy has a piece of a CD in it, a coke can forms the base of a sculpture.
“All my work is kinda slow,” says Parker. “If I have an idea it usually sits for awhile until I figure out how to make it.”
Parker in his live-work space.
Parker’s landlord keeps raising the rent so he plans to move to Ridgewood in June and have a separate studio.
Environmentalism is a recurring thread in Parker’s work, though it may not be obvious at first sight. It often comes down to a question of display—how do you create a room that has “finished” works and “overflow” works, and what can the artist do to highlight the tension between done and undone?
“[It’s] a mystery to me,” says Parker of his triangular lamp, which took on its distinctive shape seemingly of its own accord. The shade is layers of tinted epoxy, “and there’s a piece of a cd in there.”
Since it opened in the summer of 2012, Frank Traynor’s Perfect Nothing Catalog — an ice shack–turned-shop that its owner transplanted from upstate New York to Brooklyn — has already relocated twice: from its original home in a Greenpoint garden to the backyard of a gallery in Bushwick, and, very briefly this summer, to a subway platform in Williamsburg. That particular pitstop, set up outside a more permanent subway retail outlet called The Newsstand, was a show called Behind Flamingo Plaza. “It was named after my high-school hangout, an all thrift-store strip mall in Miami — a very formative space for my aesthetic and a vibe I wanted to honor,” explains Traynor.
Plenty of designers who work primarily in two dimensions translate their patterns and images to textiles, but up-and-coming London designer Lucy Hardcastle's oeuvre is particularly diverse — a former textiles student, she creates three-dimensional objects, sets, and artworks made of everything from cement to Jell-O, then draws on those creations to make prints for clients like Nike and Alexander Wang.
Even with its door wide open, Isaac Nichols’s Greenpoint studio is easy to miss. Walk past, look around, turn back, and there it is, tucked inside a cavernous, garage-like space that’s served as a creative home base for Nichols (who works under the name Group Partner) and a wide circle of artist friends for the past two years. The studio, unassuming from the outside, hums within: music plays; the stretch and tear of packing tape is constant. All around, laid out on makeshift surfaces and shelves, are Nichols’s signature pieces in varying stages of completion: ceramic pots molded to mimic breasts, each adorned in a hand-painted outfit, and his famous face pots, each with one of three appointed names: Adam, Rory, or Pat.
