30h x 24w in.
Oil on canvas
Sara Nickleson is an artist, curator, and gallery director based in Detroit, Michigan. She has held the position of Senior Director at Library Street Collective gallery in Detroit since 2016. Prior to moving to Detroit, Nickleson was the Head Curator and Director of Collections at the Design Exchange (DX) in Toronto, Canada, where she curated several internationally acclaimed exhibitions, including This is Not a Toy (with John Wee Tom and Pharrell Williams), The Politics of Fashion, and 3DXL. Nickleson has written for arts publications, including exhibition catalogs (José Parlá, Polarities; This is Not a Toy; Coping Mechanisms) and artist monographs (Sam Friedman). She has been a visiting curator and critic and was invited by the British Council to take part in their Design Connections symposium as part of London Design Week in 2015. Nickleson received her BFA from the University of Windsor (Windsor, Canada) and her BID from the College for Creative Studies (Detroit, MI); currently, Nickleson is an MFA Candidate in Painting at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
Nickleson attempts to orchestrate various applications of paint, texture, and rendering in the service of psychological transference and her own interest in the possibilities of expanded consciousness. Through figuration and portraiture in oil paint, she interprets shifting and amorphous mental states by drawing from concepts and ideas around mental health and its treatment. Presenting the figure as a physical representation of intense cognitive and affective states, she portrays the body as a site of expansion and metamorphosis in service of the mind.
