Alex Nichols
Conceptual Artist and Writer
I am currently launching a blog highlighting artist processes and perspectives called: ALEX: Perspectives in Present Tense https://alexhnichols.home.blog/ This is an artist’s take. An artist, interviewing artists. The questions I want to ask. I love process. It is a personal obsession of mine and gives me great joy. I love to know the questions people ask themselves. What drives them. What they look at and what they see. I talk with different artists, writers, and people who inspire me about their processes in these interviews.
As I enter 2022, I realize how critical these different perspectives on the world are to me. Sitting down with someone and hearing their process and thoughts is healing. I get to step outside of my internal psychological landscape and enter someone else’s inner world. It is like traveling to an unknown landscape or city. My interest in perspectives has been lifelong. I was born a twin, and though we came from the same womb, lived in the same bedroom, and experienced everything side by side, our perceptions of the world were utterly different. That was both confounding and curious to me. I discovered my passion for transcribing an artists’ process through a series of unexpected evictions in 2015. Now in 2022, I miss sharing the things I hear and see among my fellow artists, writers, and thinkers.
In 2018 I co-curated with Mushi Wooseong James the Future Cities Exhibition. Our curation centered around a new plain of thinking that was not bound by the current projections of the future. We sought to bring together a diverse group of artists who we believed exposed new ways of seeing.
The new space on the ground floor with the large windows enhances the Public access and exposure to the Center’s vision and can really ignite dialogue. Like the efforts of Future Cities to examine and reflect the current urban fabric of San Francisco I feel with the Center there is real opportunity to engage the public.
As an artist, I love the connection of Architects, Urban planners, Designers, Poets, and Artists coming together to shape the future. From 2016 to 2019, I was invited to share a large industrial space next to Levy Art & Architecture. I developed exhibitions and dinners around transforming ideas into physical experiences with my artist collective. We had great discussions about space, moving through space, and how to design space as an experience with Ross Levy and his team. Their expertise in constructing and visioning space on the scale that architects work for our exhibitions was invaluable. That possibility of having different fields of thought overlapping is where real change can occur. I hope that the Center becomes a beacon of multidisciplinary thinking for innovation.
At the end of April, I will be attending the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, which is recognized internationally for its pre-eminence as an artist residency.
Deeper Dive:
INTERVIEW: I had the opportunity to share my personal experiences as an artist interviewed by Jared Blumenfeld on PODSHIP: EARTH Episode123
Alex Nichols’: Observations of Earth about my practice as an artist and my life as an artist. https://www.podshipearth.com/alex
“Art is fundamental to understanding who we are in context to the world. Artists blend physical and emotional landscapes, threading magic into our lives. No one embodies this quest more than Alex Nichols. We met on a cold spring Vermont day when we were both 14 and every day since I have watched in awe as she works with explosive vision and unparalleled focus to express her artistic voice. Alex’s art focuses on observing and translating the world inside her, the world around her, and the world between us all. Great art transcends the every day, showing us who we are and who we aspire to be. Art is one of the most important tools we have for healing the planet. Alex has stayed true to that pursuit no matter how difficult the journey. “Jared Blumenfeld
EXHIBITION:
ALEXANDMUSHI: Alex Nichols and Mushi Wooseong James
TWO CONVERSATIONS
A new language of connection
“Nonverbal communication is an elaborate secret code that is written nowhere, known by none, and understood by all.” -Edward Sapir
MODERNISM WEST is pleased to announce the exhibition “Two Conversations”by ALEXANDMUSHI, a collaboration between artists Alex Nichols and Mushi Wooseong James. “Two Conversations” is a multimedia dialogue across time, space, and bodies, gathering two works developed over the past six years: “Two Chairs” 2017-2021 and “Still Conversations” 2015-2019. In 2015, frustrated with the limits of traditional forms of communication, ALEXANDMUSHI set out to uncover a new language of interpersonal connection, using objects and the body as sites for experimentation. Both works combine playfulness with simple artistic constraints to challenge normative modes of communication and explore new, more organic forms of knowing. MODERNISM WEST @ Foreign Cinema
BOOK: Super proud of this book which took two years of making during COVID. “Still Conversations”. This book is based on a project that took place between Seoul and San Francisco between 2015 and 2019 from the desire for physical connection in the face of so much distance. With Alex in San Francisco and Mushi in Seoul, we performed a kind of digital mail art seeking to bridge the gaps between language, body, and place. Mirroring each other’s poses became a way of staying connecting and having a physical experience without being in the same physical room.
“Still Conversations” offers a refreshing, somatic approach to the kind of distant communication that has become ubiquitous in the Covid-19 era. Paired with the images is the story of our collaboration and how a single conversation on the street led to a collaboration. We want to offer our audience an intimate glance into our individual identities and what it took to create this sense of ‘togetherness’ that we discovered.
ALEXANDMUSHI, is an art collaboration between Alex Nichols and Mushi Wooseong James examining humanity’s central challenge: relationship.
About Alex Nichols:
Alex Nichols is a San Francisco-based conceptual artist who combines writing, performance, video, photography, and installation. Her work deconstructs the experience of self as narrated and performed; with a disarming physicality, rigor, and humor Alex explores what it takes to reveal ourselves, and the resistance we meet in our external contexts as well as our internal psychological landscape.
She has exhibited and performed locally and internationally, working with renowned institutions such as 18th Street Artist Residency, Headlands Center For The Arts, Djerassi, Bamboo Curtain Studios Taipei, SF Recology, ZONA MACO Mexico City. She received her MFA in writing from California College of Arts. In 2015 Alex Nichols founded the artist collective Think Make Tank. Alex is also known as ALEXANDMUSHI
ALEXANDMUSHI: A collaboration b/w Alex Nichols & Mushi Wooseong James examining humanity’s central theme: connection. Conceptual artists engaged in social practice, performance, and process-based documentation including photography, video, writing, and installation.
THINK MAKE TANK: Founded in San Francisco in 2015. Co-founder Mushi Wooseong James. Primary team: Jorge Bachman and Magali Charbit. Think Make Tank is an Art tank, an artist collective, an art lab for creating experiences. The goal of the collective is to incite dialogue and conversation around how we perceive the world.
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