This article is part of Hyperallergic’s Pride Month series, featuring an interview with a different transgender or nonbinary emerging or mid-career artist every weekday throughout the month of June.
Are Avery Z. Nelson’s paintings winking at us? The Brooklyn-based artist is a magician of abstraction who can take a single word or concept and multiply and transform it, yielding various iterations of faintly figurative, profoundly evocative canvases. Discernible forms flicker in and out of view, shapes collapse in on themselves, and pools of color spill open, revealing abysses that lead to infinite worlds. Nelson, who identifies as trans/nonbinary, finds in the plurality of meaning and language a resonant analogy for their experience of reality. In the interview below, the artist shares their approach to painting, pays tribute to Martin Wong (“tender and incredibly queer”), and reminds us of the happiness that can be unlocked when we gently, lovingly set our ego aside.
Hyperallergic: What is the current focus of your artistic practice?
Avery Z. Nelson: My painting practice is rooted in playing with various ways to articulate sensation and perception. Grounded in movement, dance, and meditation, the experiences I paint are translated through encountering the world as a queer, nonbinary body. Specificity through perception, the malleability of materiality through the contingency of context and relationships, and translation are three core components of my practice. For example, in my most recent solo show, I don’t want to live in a world without feathers at Nogueras Blanchard Gallery in Barcelona, the exhibition centered on a trio of “Pitcher” paintings, each with a different play on the word.
“Pitcher 1” (2022) approaches the term through a pitcher in a ballgame. Thinking about initiation and the moment just before the ball is flung into the air, this painting is full of tension and grip, utilizing a contrasting color scheme of cadmium oranges and acidic greens and a hard-edged playing field. A tensed bird claw extends from a muscular mass gripping a ball-shaped form in suspense, just prior to initiating the game. In response, “Pitcher 2” (2022) takes the form of a seductive carnivorous Sarracenia plant, also referred to as a “pitcher plant.” The plant lures its prey with beauty and deception via its pitcher-shaped traps. Yellows, greens, and seductive pinks flow throughout this painting where landscape and form blend together in a constant play of interiority and exteriority always in flux. In “Pitcher 3” (2022) I’ve painted a self-portrait as a dancing gay top (referencing the gay slang meaning of “pitcher”). Tits and a dick, loosely painted, refers to topping as the vulnerability of showing off and showing it all. Together, these three paintings locate the exhibition in a system of pitcher, pitcher, pitcher.
H: In what ways — if any — does your gender identity play a role in your experience as an artist?
AZN: My gender identity is at the heart of my practice and experience of being an artist. In painting, I rework images from queer and trans lifeworlds that move beyond didactic approaches to representation and identity (x=x) into the finer-textured, mobile, and at times conflicting realities of how people encounter each other and create together in the world. The collective joy of a dissolving ego and sharing movement on a dance floor with others and the daily practice of presence fuel my belief in the possibilities of painting, transqueerness, and encounter.
H: Which artists inspire your work today? What are your other sources of inspiration?
AZN: There are many, but of recent significance to me is Martin Wong. I saw his show Malicious Mischief at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin three times. I left the show in awe of Wong’s practice and with a re-found commitment to a fearless type of living that centers curiosity and not-knowing in the process of making. Tender and incredibly queer, I’m so grateful for his bravery and gifts.
H: What are your hopes for the LGBTQIA+ community at the current moment?
AZN: To remember the power of levity while continuing to brave the work of fighting for structural change and freedom. To quote Mariame Kaba, “Everything worthwhile is done with others.”
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