Nick Meyer received his BFA from MassArt in 2005 and his MFA from California College of the Arts in 2008. He is the recipient of the Pace Gallery Award and the Barclay Simpson Prize. He has published two monographs “Pattern Language” (Brick, 2010) and “Either Limits or Contradictions” (Daylight, 2017). He lives in Western Massachusetts with his wife and two daughters.
Either Limits or Contradictions
I am afraid of dying but I didn’t make these pictures with that fear in mind.
As people in my life have died, given birth and the pace has begun to slow, these cycles have become apparent to and the work has formed around this thought.
I revisit albums that my father had created before he died. I see the people who are gone now and miss the children who didn’t get the chance to be pasted into the pages of my history. In these periodicals, people, who, in my life, I have loved and mourned, become Grandmother, Father and Friend, no names attached. Their story doesn’t belong to me.
This forced me look outwardly at the world or rather the world has started to invade the safety and naivety that I built around myself. As my world has become more vulnerable my subjects stop being not mine, but rather stand-ins for whoever, wherever and whatever.I took these pictures to remember that things pass. They are a memorial to a life being lived. A meditation on pacing and prose and letting things unfold. These pictures are meant as a means of facing our truths and trying to accept fate.
[portfolio_slideshow id=46039 pagerpos=disabled autoplay=false]
Pick up a copy of his book recently published with Daylight Books here!
To view more of their work please visit their website.