Biography
Alex H Nichols is a U.S.A-based multi-media artist who combines performance, video, photography, painting, installation, and writing. She questions how we define ourselves, working with the contradictions of internal and external narrations. The dominant themes in her work are self, story, perception, desire, and potential. Her artistic practice puts her body through questions: Who am I today, yesterday, and tomorrow? What am I up against?
Her current works utilize diverse forms of the novel, installation, and performance. PINKBOX is an installation, sculpture, and performance developed in 2022 at the Djerassi residence that aims to discover how we navigate the roles of our lives and what it takes to impact change in our relationship to our societal, familial, and gender roles.
Alex H Nichols’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in Zonamaco 2023, Moca Taipei, Headlands Center for The Arts, Modernism Gallery, Re.riddle, and Minnesota Street Projects. She has participated in residences from Bamboo Curtain Taipei, Recology S.F., 18th Street Arts Center, and Djerassi. She has lectured at UC Berkeley and California College of Arts. She received her MFA in writing at California College of the Arts in 2011. Her interest in artist communities led her to build a collaborative (ALEXANDMUSHI 2015-2021) and a collective (THINK MAKE TANK 2015-2019) to promote open places of exploration around self-awareness, perspectives, and empowerment.
Thoughts on Djerassi Resident Artist Program
The time it takes to grow moss. The sound of a falling tree in a redwood forest. The color of fog climbing a hill at dusk and wild turkeys screeching. This is what I observed.
In April 2022, I was an artist in residence at Djerassi. The rolling hills were green. I had cohorts from Austria to California. Writers, filmmakers, performers, painters. While I dragged my PINKBOX across the fields through the eerie fog, I could hear two artists laughing in the distance, recording the wild turkey sounds. While I was eating breakfast, a writer cooking eggs would say, “Everyone knows that to make a character interesting, they must encounter…” and I would jump up from my seat and start running, saying, “Wait…” grabbing a pen and paper, “I don’t know that. Let me write it down.”
My studio was the dancer’s studio with the polished wood floors and the giant rolling mirrors. I finished my novel and launched my PINKBOX performance and installation. I moved through the dancer’s space at night, encountering multiples of me reflected from mirror to mirror. While filming in the woods, I heard a tree fall, and I screamed because it sounded like the forest was rolling toward me. Moss grows imperceptibly on the side of a sculpture, like the side of an oak tree. I think about permanence and impermanence as I work. Time is the constant component. At the end of the day, one of the artists is by my side recording sounds, and another is walking through the back of my film with his Austrian suit, vest, and hat, looking like a figure from the past. “Fine, walk through my film,” I yell at him, laughing. “Fine, I will.” He says as he keeps walking back and forth disappearing into the fog. With my bright PINKBOX collapsed in the foreground, I climb in and begin to roll.
The Djerassi Artists Residence Program gave me the opportunity to contemplate and develop the PINKBOX concept. On September 16, 2023, I returned to Djerassi to honor this experience, to suspend the PINKBOX installation in the redwood forest, and to gather artists around the idea of navigation on the site where these ideas began. Djerassi’s ability to support me in this space gave me the opportunity to contemplate and expand.
http://alexhnichols.com
instagram: @alexnichols