August 2021 Artist in Residency: Nicole Mauser

Our second resident at the lab is Nicole Mauser! We sat down with her to discuss her practice, influences, and what she hopes to accomplish during their month long residency.

Cutting Room Floor, 2010–2021
Dimensions: approximately 60in x 60in
Materials: 60 in x 60 in on grey latex (Benjamin Moore) floor paint gradient on floor/column, (7) paintings on paper oil, acrylic on gessoed watercolor paper, (4) 35mm black and white photographs 4 in x 6 in, and 2 inkjet prints.

Q & A

Interviewed by Colleen Keihm

LATITUDE and I are so excited to have you joining our community as the August 2021 Artist in Resident! What are you excited to work on during your time at the residency?

I’m excited to continue to collide my painting process that focuses on color as light with digital methods to make collages. By scanning, printing, painting, then repeating this process within one frame again and again, I am ultimately interested in the recursion or layering and repetition that embeds my physical gestures within digital process(es). I will collect all of the scans, prints, paintings, and tests in an artist book inspired by Isa Genzken (always) to trace the trajectory of time and image development during the residency.

Tell us about yourself! What is your favorite place in Chicago, what brought you to this city, and what makes you want to stick around?

One of many favorite places in Chicago is the lake shore. I love walking around Montrose Harbor including the bird sanctuary aka “magic hedge.” Kayaking in the lake and the river in all its post industrial rusty glory is alway wonderful. Getting to see the city from the point of view of Lake Michigan, is remote and quiet- a wild contrast to loud chaotic city life. I feel that the beaches are some of the last few democratic spaces in the city where people of all ages, cultures, and walks of life gather to enjoy the fresh air and outdoors. Sometimes I encounter people on the beach that remind me of Florida, which is always special.

I initially moved here to attend graduate school at the University of Chicago. We’ve actually moved away and then returned for family, friendships, diversity, community, progressive ideas, as well as job opportunities especially within the art world. Over the past 3 years, we renovated a live/work space that houses office space, my studio, and we opened a modest storefront gallery called Space & Time to host events and exhibitions and support artists making exciting work.

You work with different media but your primary focus is Painting. How does your time at Latitude fit into your trajectory as a maker?

The residency gives me the opportunity to continue investigating the collision of digital images and gestural mark making to collapse and complicate pictorial space. I’ve actually been making digital collages from paintings (not yet vice versa) for years and this is a focused time to develop new physical scenarios and play.

Untitled (Color Memory), 2018
Oil and acrylic on gessoed paper

To begin your residency, you are going to be working with staff to try to recreate a pink that is typically outside of a printing gamut. What about this is interesting to you?

Gamut is the part of the color spectrum that is visible to the human eye. This range may differ and is specific to each person as well as manufacture of pigment, device, system, or program. Gamut intersects the world of RGB, CMYK, graphic design, calibration, screens, LEDs, technology, devices, and more broadly how we experience illumination in general on a daily basis which continues to shift quickly in the 21st century which Amy Sillman writes humorously and precisely about from a painters’ perspective. Certain color wavelengths push subjective levels of comfort and taste. I’m interested in how something is repeated yet never quite the same within image reproduction when color moves between actual/physical/original and the printed version where that starts to break down. Pushing the mechanical as far as we can is a kind of absurd play. This is informed by my background in printmaking.

What drew our panel to your application was an appreciation of light. What are your thoughts about light and how does that affect your practice?

I’m interested in translating light- currently reflections or holograms- into paintings which takes an additive color process and translates into subtractive color. In theory this is no different from the act of traditional observational painting. In practice, I tend to frame color and gestures in ways that crop and hold a detail to become an endless color field or expansive gradient. However, I do try to push the paint as material so that the color feels both fleeting or removed and yet always reveals the hand upon closer inspection. Ideally it is a performance of both additive and subtractive at once to build space.

TSA_PDF
Color Memory, Compressed, 2010-2020
Two black and white 35mm photographs (5 x 7 in) and oil paint on gessoed paper, scanned on desktop printer at 300dpi
12 x 15 inches

What are you reading/listening to/consuming right now that you are excited about?

I’ve been listening to Holly Herndon's electronic music. One of the tracks features Martine Syms, an influential artist formerly based in Chicago who founded a former shop called Golden Age that I loved dearly and continues to inspire my efforts. Martine’s work in video and installation continues to impress me. I enjoy Jesse Lanza’s DJ sets on YouTube from quarantine last year.  I’m excited about a few exhibitions coming up that I’m organizing. At Space & Time, we are excited to feature a site specific installation solo exhibition by Mara Baker for the Terrain Biennial. Also for the past few years I’ve been working on an exhibition featuring Miyoko Ito’s paintings that opens this fall at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, an artist-run gallery collective. 

Untitled (Color Memory), 2018
Oil and acrylic on gessoed paper