Nicole Irene Anderson
Working in oil, casein, and drawing media, I create paintings and drawings that convey collective uneasiness and human vulnerability reflective of our current times. I explore complex questions of land,home, and the psychological impact of expansion in the American West through the language of the landscape centered around my home state of California. These contemplative works bring forth multiple associations and conflicting emotions regarding our environment: the often personal and tender memories of home, the comfort and beauty of the ordinary landscape, painful histories, and the anxieties of living in a world forever altered by human-caused climate change. I travel to locations throughout California, searching for areas that elicit a response triggering the nervous system where environmental damage, human alteration, or architectural remnants of the past are noticeable. I document these visual tensions between pain and beauty with my camera and use the photographs as source material for my compositions. These everyday places become visual metaphors for more significant societal and environmental concerns, advocating for empathy and care that should be practiced for the land we inhabit.
Nicole Irene Anderson (b. 1993, Cambria, CA) earned a B.F.A. in Painting/Drawing from California College of the Arts in San Fransisco and is a current M.F.A. candidate at the University of California, Davis. The artist has participated in exhibitions at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (San Luis Obispo, CA); the Museum of Sonoma County (Santa Rosa, CA); the David Brower Center (Berkeley, CA); and Root Division (San Francisco, CA). Anderson has received grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and the Discovered: Emerging Visual Artist Grant from Creative Sonoma. Her practice was recently covered in Sonoma Magazine, and her work has been documented in catalogs and published in the Pacific Coast edition of New American Paintings, no. 157. Anderson currently lives and works in Davis and Santa Rosa, California.
