June 20, 2019 452 PM
MARFA – On Saturday, June 22, Chinati will host an open studio by artist in residence Nicolas Shake at the Locker Plant on East Oak Street from 6-8pm. The event is free and everyone is invited to stop by.
Nicolas Shake was born in Northridge, California and lives and works in Los Angeles. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA, 2008) and Claremont Graduate University, where he earned his MFA in 2011. Shake is a multimedia artist working in painting, photography, and sculpture, with a focus on reframing the everyday human-made detritus that he encounters on the border of the city and the desert. Shake’s sculptures and large-scale installations reference and incorporate elements of this urban and exurban debris. Arranged into carefully lit tableaux, they have been staged along southern California’s San Andreas Fault Line from Coachella Valley to the Salton Sea and via Vast Space Projects in Las Vegas.
Of his approach to making work, Shake has written: “I focus on the castoff household and utilitarian items that show up in the desert on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The items I engage with could easily be categorized as rhopography, but it is this insignificance that gives them the ability to be reassigned a new aesthetic value, transforming the rubbish into something unexpected by capturing and conveying its uncanny power and peculiar beauty.”
On view at the Locker Plant will be works and works-in-progress that Shake has made during his May–June residency. In oblique and transformative ways, Shake’s sculptures made from patterned thermoplastic, dyed fabrics exposed to sun and rain, and abstract works on paper distill and evoke aspects of the West Texas landscape, particularly the zones where one landscape merges with or gives way to another on the outskirts of town.
The Chinati Foundation’s Artist in Residence program is generously supported by the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation and the Chinati Contemporary Council. Chinati is grateful for the generous financial support of our members and the support and in-kind contributions of the people of Marfa.
