FST StudioProjects Fund

IN THE STUDIO WITH AVERY Z. NELSON

2021 FST StudioProjects Fund recipient, American artist Avery Z. Nelson (b. 1983, lives and works in New York) welcomes us digitally in their current studio space in Bushwick to discuss how embodiment and introspection influences their work.  

by Myriam Erdely, April 2022

Thank you for taking some time to discuss your practice and current studio space. Our interview is done digitally, over Zoom calls, emails, sharing images and written words, but I hope to visit you in person soon! Where did you grow up and where is your studio space?

I grew up in Rhinebeck, NY, in the Hudson Valley. I went to Barnard College and did my MFA at Columbia University in 2009, before moving to Chicago for a number of years. My heart has always been in New York City, and I was able to move back to Brooklyn in 2018. Shortly after, I was fortunate enough to be awarded the Sharpe-Walentas Fellowship, which included a free 450 sq. feet studio in Dumbo for a year and allowed me to begin to work large-scale again. Thanks to the FST StudioProjects Fund, I was able to continue to paint in large format and smoothly transition into a wonderful new studio after the Sharpe-Walentas program ended in 2021.

That’s wonderful! Having won a grant from the FST StudioProjects Fund in 2021, which was created by Frederieke Sanders Taylor, in order to help artists defray the cost of their studios in New York City, how has the FST StudioProjects Fund grant changed your practice? 

Due to the FST StudioProjects Fund and some serious luck in the New York City studio marketplace, I was able to secure a space in Bushwick that is not only perfect for my painterly needs but is also within walking distance from my apartment. My new working space has windows, enough room to work big, and a positive artist-run floor. Also, being able to pop over to the studio at unexpected times and conversely to leave for a couple of hours when I need to clear my head without losing the rest of the day has had an incredible impact on my practice. 

What are some of your influences?

This past week I spent some significant time looking through Sigmar Polke and Brenna Youngblood’s paintings online and thinking about Jennifer Packer’s exceptional show at the Whitney (insert details of show). I’m also currently rereading Deleuze’s book on Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation; a wonderful read that I’d recommend to anyone interested in the relationship between embodiment and painting. My newest series of paintings employ the notion of a ‘body without organs’ as methodology for making destabilized, queer paintings—hopefully haptically figurative and flux-uating. 

For example, in the painting Retrograde, a gently curved line on the right-hand side of the painting delineates the contour of a very large head, as well as an aerial view of a butt, depending on one’s reading. This shape is scaled down and repeated on the left-hand side of the painting and rotated 90 degrees. What is possibly a thumb (or is it a phallus?) holds the smaller face-butt shape in suspension, either facing down or being patted from above. I’m interested in landscape as ‘headscape,’ and utilizing color, saturation, line, and ambiguous forms to blur interior and exterior spaces. An upside-down calendar occupies the upper left-hand side of the painting, also marking time passing. I made this painting about 9 months into the pandemic, in New York City. As the title suggests, there is a sense of looking backwards in time, at the horror and devastation of the first year of the pandemic. 

Can you tell me more about the types of materials you use? What is the significance of specific elements in your work?

The paintings are all oil on canvas and currently range from about 30 x 36 inches to 5 x 6 feet. In my newest body of work, many of the paintings have geometric shapes that are either matt black or covered in an acrylic textured material that is granular and rough. The textured surfaces and matt black shapes often relate to cosmic or mathematical components of each painting and also visually serve to offer a space of everything-ness and nothingness at once. For example, in Memento Mori, I took the notion of the Möbius strip as the basis of the painting, alongside an idea Deleuze mentions in a lecture about the soul folding infinitely into itself upon death. I’m interested in both of these systems as they share endlessly in process (folding) while also articulating something finite (life in this body). As a non-binary/trans queer person, I have a lot at stake in methods that destabilize contours and binaries.  

And what are you working on next?

I’ve been primarily working towards a solo show at Rachel Uffner gallery scheduled to open September 16th 2022! 

Exciting! I look forward to it!

Check out Avery Z. Nelson’s Upcoming Solo Show:
September 16 - November 5, 2022 at Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY