Lunch Time Artist Talks: Nathan Wilkinson

My photographic and sculptural artistic practice explores the intersections and symbiosis of mediums. Three-dimensionality influences my image-making to consider psycho-physiological impacts of shape and space. Hand-carved biomorphic, hole-riddled basswood sculptures act as multi-aperture lenses to create photograms. Intuitively crafted, the 19thcentury photographic medium captures the sculpture’s shadow – while its portals interplay with light alchemically transmutes the object into a lens. Uniting the sculptural lens with light-sensitive paper through direct contact and varying layered shadows inserts the cameras’ Persona characteristics into a traditionally lens-less medium. Photograms are manipulated post-process by digitizing 20th-century Surrealist darkroom methods – inversion, mirroring, multi-exposure, solarization, superimposition – merging 19th through 21st century photographic practices.

Conceptual and research-driven, my work engages with Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, Jungian analytical psychology, Rosalind Krauss’ L’Amour fou: Photography and Surrealism, and Matilde Marcolli’s Lumen Naturae: Visions of the Abstract in Art and Mathematics. Reacting to imagery, methods, and research throughout the creation process guides my fascination with humans’ capacity to communicate, see, and think abstractly.

Fusing mediums’ aesthetics and formal techniques are a foundation for exploring abstraction, embodiment, exponential duality, structures of consciousness, and symbolism. I use the darkroom as a symbolic space to balance and traverse the universal duality of chaos and order. My being and the material immersed in darkness, intermittent spells of light shining on us, and images revealing themselves from a void – white turns to black and preserving what’s necessary – embodies the universal journey of contending with chaos and order through rituals of light and shadow.