Nicolas Lenker
Hearth, 2011, cinder blocks, wood, paint, digitally collaged photographic prints, clay, glaze, luster, gold and silver leaf, lighting, plants, vinyl, speakers, projection of video game performance with custom music, Installation View
Limited Entry, 2011, wood, drywall, paint, door, aluminum, lighting, fake security cameras, handmade welcome mat, 8ft H x 8ft W x variable depending on installation
Following a 3 day performance/ solo show at Pageant Gallery, Philadelphia in April of 2012, Nick Lenker will be showing objects and video documenting the event.
The images above are 2 of the objects used in the event.
Aritst Statement
My work deals with the human condition.
Some of the themes explored within my work: self-actualization, new age, masculinity, apocalyptic imagery, drug culture, domestic spaces, and simulacrum.
My perspective is highly influenced by my upbringing as a Jehovah’s Witness. As a child, I expected and looked forward to the apocalypse and the end/ beginning of my life. I believed that I would never grow to be an adult before the world ended. And then it didn’t end, and I grew, but was still waiting. When the end doesn’t come, where are you left? I eventually left the religion as a teenager but was immediately confronted with my homosexuality which made me withdraw further from the conservative social world in which I lived. I make art from this perspective, that of a former member of an apocalyptic religion and as a gay man, an outsider looking in on a world that I feel I don’t belong to. I feel that my loss of this faith made me question and seek a truth that was my own. I wanted to know what the purpose of my existence was.
I did this in many ways; the main way was the research of religion and philosophy. Eastern, Western, the study of mythologies from ancient religions, and the rituals associated with them. I wanted to understand what “god” was. I found so much similarity. The psychology behind faith started to interest me greatly; how do faith and the rituals of faith influence the growth of a human being? Rituals started to look like elaborate psychodramas for the benefit of the mind of the inductee.
My work takes the form of rituals/ performances reflective of my research and understanding of the function of “god”. The objects/ sculptures I make are functional ritual objects occupying constructed “sacred spaces” that are made exclusively for these performances. The influence of psychology make these spaces surreal as if from a dream, but a dream that has a half-remembered purposefulness.
I am exploring rites of passage, particularly if they still exist or what they have become in contemporary life. My interests finally settled on the space referred to in pop culture as the “man cave”. This space interested me due to the fact that it is usually in a basement and is crafted by an adult man as a place to be alone or as some describe, “a shrine to his youth”. I made a possible connection between these dark spaces and the rites performed in the Stone Age cultures. Here Joseph Campbell writes on the subject:
“The Paleolithic cave sanctuaries found in France and Spain are believed to have provided settings for male initiation rites. At Lascaux, for example, it is thought that adolescent boys were led down the dark, winding, and descending passages to the inner womblike chambers. Here… the boys became no longer their mother’s sons but their father’s sons.”
Is this recent phenomenon or recent attention to the “man cave” related to the disappearance of rites performed between life stages?
The purpose of a performed rite is to alter the inductee’s understanding of reality, to give them an ending so they can have a beginning. Again, when the end doesn’t come, where are you left?
More information available at www.nicklenker.com