Square Root
Nikko Mueller
9 x 12 inches
2024
ABOUT THE ARTIST
(b.1977 Philadelphia, PA)
He lives and works in San Diego, CA. He is a Professor of Art at Southwestern College.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Square Root began as two gradations of nested rectangles. This familiar motif twists and deforms as the canvas pinches and folds and, like a sociable homage to the square, one form reaches out to connect with its neighbor.
My work grows out of the traditions, forms, and materials of painting but has often been associated with textiles. I am interested in pattern and sequence generally, and I often employ patterns from textiles. Recently I have been exploring the materiality of the traditional canvas support for painting and engaging in its flexible fabric nature.
I do this by folding and pleating painted canvases, then re-stretching these on their original frames, creating misalignments and undulating distortions to the patterns and forms pictured. These re-stretched canvases become a puzzle to solve, a picture plane made manifold, a disruption seeking a resolution. These works envision rupture and recovery, transformation and memory.
They evoke lost coherence and pragmatic (if provisional) solutions. I am interested in the context INTIKA explores- male artists operating in spaces historically gendered female. The idea of disrupting narrow definitions of gender toward a more flexible, relevant, and complex representation is compelling. I am interested in the tension between painting and textile as a proxy or analog for this dynamic.
What spaces do my images inhabit as their surface becomes less singular, planar, or Platonic? How does a pattern shift and reconstitute itself when the ground becomes unstable? What happens when the margins encroach and the center collapses? These questions are literal and immediately relevant in my works but echo outward to congruent questions and disruptions in our culture.
MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES
Acrylic paint and canvas.
Acrylic on canvas.