Brook Rosini
Dispatch from the Center Program: Introducing Kristin Nason
We're back with more insider info about The Center Program experience! Today, we meet Kristin Nason, an artist who works with found objects and uses her artistic practice to comment on the collisions and contact that comprise life. In the below meditation on movement, she finds her thoughts returning to a specific scene from an unlikely source. Which comedic actor haunts Kristin in her studio? Read on to find out!
- Brook Rosini, Marketing & Communications Manager
Channeling Chevy Chase
Kristin Nason, Center Program artist, in her piece entitled Balance (2011)
I’ve been thinking a lot about Chevy Chase in the studio recently. There's this sequence from one of his National Lampoon’s Vacation movies that keeps coming back to me: He's launching the family station wagon, stuffed to the gills with luggage and people, off a dead end road in the middle of nowhere.
This guy needs a vacation from his vacation.
There is constant movement in these films. Packing and unpacking, shuffling stuff, careening around the roundabout one more time as night falls, lashing things down only to have them come apart again in a dramatic crash. The physical realities of life always seem to be asking more of him than he can handle.
Decoy, 2012
The absurd events that unfold highlight the gap between theory and execution. There are these plans- flawless and glossy in his mind- that fall apart in all directions once they begin to unfold in the material world.
Decoy, 2012
My practice is centered around collecting stuff, mainly discarded things, and trying to put them together. Mostly, my work is a record of the ongoing struggle with the material world: moving things around as a method of orientation, triangulation through touch, knocking against the edges to find the limits.
Decoy, 2012
These kinds of collisions are everywhere in the Vacation movies. One gets the sense that Chevy is primarily moving along through impact, like a bowling ball down a bumper lane. Not unlike his absurd vacations, my practice also fumbles ahead in this way: making contact with things, letting them push me.
