Sometimes Clouds Come Back This Way
6” x 384” x 384”
Concrete
2019
2019 FSP/Jerome Fellow
Artist Statement
My work is about bodies: aging bodies, working bodies, plastic bodies, protesting bodies, walking bodies, bodies coping with anger and uncertainty. I make art engaged with the power and politics of the body in a late-capital, post-industrial, changing climate. I explore the ways in which capitalism, the design of digital technologies, the built environment, and the regulation of the natural environment choreograph and construct daily life.
The meaning and knowledge taken in through corporeal experience has power beyond which that is taken in through the mind alone; however, embodied experience and physical encounter are increasingly dematerialized by global commerce, digital technologies and big data: there is a loss of connection to the physical world and one another. This erosion of empathy is witnessed in climate change and political extremism. My work is impacted by these factors, and in so doing addresses a second body. Beyond the corporeal experience of the world, there is a second body dispersed throughout global systems, one that is implicated and present in shipping containers, polluted air currents, the pacific gyre, nationalism, and east asian flooding.
In response, I make participatory platforms and performative sculptures, videos, photographs, and drawings that explore these systems and their implications through the spectacular and the familiar, the comical and curious, and the interplay of the physical and the intimate.
Nancy Nowacek
Born: Grand Blanc, MI, USA, 1972
Resides: Brooklyn, NY, USA
Education
MFA, California College of Art, 2011
MFA, Virginia Commonwealth University, 1996
BFA, University of Michigan, 1994