Nick FitzPatrick

WORK
Hotel
Noise
Cadence
Vermin
Compositions in Black and White [2022-]

Passages from ethically suspect contemporary legal agreements are set calligraphically and enlgarged via commercial print and copy machines.

The Compositions in Black and White invite reflection on the changing role, power, and locus of text across history.

Signs (Version 2) [2022-]

Four posters graphically present text excerpted from Shakespeare's renowned soliloquy, Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Intended for presentation in publicly-visible advertising lightboxes, the Signs recast Shakespeare's text to lampoon and reject the rhetorical practies that prevail in advertising space.

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Death Mask [2020-2022]

A series of drawings depicting figures in the midst of sustaining unspecified catastrophic injury.

The drawings in Death Mask address the contradictory psychological suspensions that characterise human subjectivity within current systems of late capitalism. Using jarring and layered emotive cues, I explore the notion of amenable participation in one's own destruction (a suicide of sorts).

Death Mask continues to develop earlier explorations into cartoon drawing and its ready capacity to articulate complex and disturbing psychological experiences.

A small number of sculputral objects are proposed to accompany the suite of drawings.

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Champagne Honda [2020-]

Within the online virutal world of Second Life, I assume the avatar and persona of Champagne Honda. Grotesquely distended, flagrantly naive, and often naked, Champagne explores her surrounds with hubristic ambitions of becoming an influential personality and real estate dealer.

The launch of Second Life was, rather hopefully, seen to represent the dawning of a virtual Utopia. It promised an open tabula rasa upon which users might create and inhabit a meaningfully new, "second" kind of society. Instead, Second Life was swiftly colonised by pre-existing, external reality, becoming a focussed microcosm of neoliberal capitalism. Against this backdrop, Champagne stands as a tragic antihero, and a painfully familiar caricature of contemporary subjectivity.

Champagne curates a feed of inspirational and motivational moments from her life on Instagram at @champagnehonda.

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Eel Meal (Second Incarnation) [2019-2020]

Eel Meal was a small, ARI-style gallery operating in Perth.

Eel Meal hosted a rolling programme of exhibitions intended to platform emerging, experimental, and resistant art practices. The gallery was closed in 2020 by mandate during the COVID-19 pandemic.

More information on Eel Meal is available at eelmeal.com.

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Monsters [2019]

A short series of drawings extending earlier techniques. Simple elements of contemporary cartooning are deranged to depict grotesque and psychologically unsettling figures. Tonal incongruity between style and substance create unfamiliar or ambiguous emotional cues.

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Signs [2019]

Small signs emblazoned with existential cautions and directives are placed in the public realm. Comic moments of shifted perspective arise in dialogues between the text, the reader, and their environment.

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Clouds [2018-2019]

Clouds is a series of semi-automatic drawings exploring pareidolia: the human tendencey to seek meaningful content within ambiguous stimuli.

Random marks were progressively refined into loosely discernable forms through iterative layers of drawing. Using this method, I position the act of drawing as an act of communion between the conscious and unconscious: a kind of interactive Rorschach test, manifesting subliminal biases towards particular perceptions.

Clouds was the first project in what has become a sustained drawing practice, and established continuing methods marrying motivations of early Automatism with techniques of contemporary vernacular drawing.

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Images [2018-]

I abstract portions of featureless photographs though heavy digital manipulation to produce gridded images suggesting vague topographical forms. These images are then laboriously reproduced by hand in pen and ink.

Images reflects on notions of quantisation and continuity in systems of human perception and meaning-making.

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Scrap Rings [2017]

Two unwieldy and roughly-hewn rings were cast in cheap, lightweight aluminium. Through material and form, the rings are rendered unfit for their suggested purpose.

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Leaves [2017]

Photographs of leaves are disrupted by artefacts of digital compositing and manipulation. Black fields suggest erasure or incompleteness of the image, or unintentional exposure of an encompassing digital space. The dynamic between representation and its construction is revealed and left unresolved.

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Eel Meal (First Incarnation) [2015-2017]

Eel Meal was an experimental newspaper project intended to challenge notions of authorship, ownership, permanence, and authority within contemporary art practices. Each issue invited 12 nominated artists to contribute one page of uncredited content. No guidelines were provided on the nature of the content.

100 copies of each issue were printed; one copy was dispatched to each artist, with the remaining 88 copies dispatched to random newspaper stands across central London to be encountered freely by the public. Ephemeral by design, no archive of the publication was kept.

Bird [2015-]

Equal parts existential and absurd, Bird is a collection of simple graphic cartoons collectively detailing the quotidian emotional landscapes of a fragile mind.

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Journal [2015-]

Since May 2015, I have maintained a public journal of ideas, experiments, and moments as a record of, and resource for, continuing practice.

Circles represent individual entries. Larger circles represent more recent entries. Use the ORDER button below to arrange circles chronologically.

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COLOUR
Photography [2010-]

Photography constitutes the foundational and best-established branch of my practice. Of all my undertakings, it has consistently represented the most ambiguous co-mingling of artistic enquiry and commercialised service.

My photographic work most often seeks to deny expectations of the image in context: subjects are distorted beyond recognition, rendered grotesque and undersirable, and meaning is at once suggested and denied. The surface of the image is often foregrounded to impose a meta-referential perspective.

Fashion photography has remained a key area of interest for me, enmeshed as it is within ethically fraught constructs of art, commerce, physical beauty, and the social zeitgeist. My work has been commissioned and published by numerous magazines, designers, and retailers. Positioning my photography within such commercialised channels is, for me, a meaningful path of resistance and opportunity to affect change.

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ABOUT
I am focussed especially upon the failures of human systems of understanding, and the often destructive and misguided behaviours to which these systems give rise. In exploring the limits and deficiencies of human endeavour and knowledge, I find solace in moments of black comedy, and ultimately seek a path towards the self-effacing dignity of Socratic ignorance.

My intellectual approaches are informed by my interests in mathematics, the natural sciences, and philosophy. My professional history within commercialised “creative practices” such as photography and graphic design often influences the formal qualities of my work.

It is my intention to maintain a mode of practice that, to the fullest extent possible:
- acknowledges its agency and complicity within the manifold systems that produce it; and
- operates with integrity, responsibility and purpose both in relation to those systems, and within itself.

CONTACT
nick@nickfitzpatrick.net
(+61) 0455 445 260
@nick___fitzpatrick
Boorloo, Australia.