This article is part of Hyperallergic‘s Pride Month Seriesfeaturing an interview with a different emerging or mid-career transgender or non-binary artist each weekday throughout June.
Do Avery Z. Nelson’s paintings wink at us? The Brooklyn-based artist is a magician of abstraction who can take a single word or concept and multiply and transform it, producing various iterations of lightly figurative yet deeply evocative canvases. Discernible shapes shimmer in and out of sight, shapes collapse in on themselves and pools of color open, revealing chasms that lead to infinite worlds. Nelson, who identifies as trans/non-binary, finds in the plurality of meaning and language a resonant analogy for their experience of reality. In the interview below, the artist shares his approach to painting, pays homage to Martin Wong (“tender and incredibly queer”) and reminds us of the happiness that can be unlocked when we gently and gently put our ego aside. love.
Hyperallergic: What is the current orientation of your artistic practice?
Avery Z. Nelson: My pictorial practice is rooted in the play of different ways of articulating sensation and perception. Based on movement, dance and meditation, the experiences I paint result in an encounter with the world as a strange, non-binary body. Specificity through perception, the malleability of materiality through the contingency of context and relationships, and translation are three essential components of my practice. For example, in my last solo exhibition, I don’t want to live in a featherless world at the Nogueras Blanchard Gallery in Barcelona, the exhibition centered on a trio of “Pitcher” paintings, each with a different play on words.
“Pitcher 1” (2022) tackles the term through a pitcher in a ball game. Thinking of the initiation and the moment just before the ball is thrown through the air, this painting is full of tension and grip, using a contrasting color palette of cadmium oranges and acid greens and a ground game with hard edges. An outstretched bird’s claw extends from a muscle mass gripping a suspended ball-like shape, just before pitching the game. In response, “Pitcher 2” (2022) takes the form of an attractive carnivorous plant Sarracenia, also called pitcher plant.” The plant attracts its prey with beauty and deception via its pitcher-like traps. Seductive yellows, greens and pinks flow in this painting where landscape and form merge in a constant play of interiority and exteriority always in motion. In “Pitcher 3” (2022), I painted a self-portrait as a dancing gay top (referring to the gay slang meaning of “pitcher”). Boobs and a dick, vaguely painted, refer to trim as the vulnerability to show off and show everything. Together, these three paintings situate the exhibition in a system of pitcher, pitcher, pitcher.
H: In what ways, if any, does your gender identity play a role in your experience as an artist?
AZN: My gender identity is central to my practice and experience as an artist. In painting, I rework images of queer and trans lifeworlds that go beyond didactic approaches to representation and identity (x=x) into the finer, mobile and sometimes conflicting realities of how people meet and create together in the world. . The collective joy of an ego dissolving and sharing movement on a dance floor with others and the daily practice of presence fuels my belief in the possibilities of painting, transqueerness and encounter. .
H: Which artists inspire your work today? What are your other sources of inspiration?
AZN: There are many, but of recent importance to me is Martin Wong. I saw his show Malevolent Mischief three times at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. I left the show in awe of Wong’s practice and with a newfound commitment to a fearless type of living that centers curiosity and unknowingness in the making process. Tender and incredibly queer, I am so grateful to her for her bravery and her gifts.
H: What are your hopes for the LGBTQIA+ community right now?
AZN: Remembering the power of lightness while continuing to brave the work of struggle for structural change and freedom. To quote Mariame Kaba, “Everything worthwhile is done with others.”
