ARTIST STATEMENT
As a gif work in the on-going series girlinabox: girlinabox seeks: story(ies), images, words…(lies, truths, accounts, tales, rumors),
from female identified humans, (feminists, all kinds), describing (telling, revealing, expressing), boxes that define, (enfold, contain, limit, explain), their life, (lives).
purpose: to share, (sustain, inhabit, pledge, engage, promise, understand, reveal) illuminate & empower.
This work describes a conversation, a story, that Gloria Steinem shared with Alice Walker and Norma Mankiller at a talk at the 92nd Street Y. Gloria talks about how major religions architectural structures resemble the body of a woman, the central ceremony of patriarchal religions take over the power of giving birth. Leading to the transformative miracle, woman may give birth but men give everlasting life…
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Niki Nolin is a Chicago based media artist. Her work blends painting, drawing and collage/assemblage with the light and motion of digital images, video and installation. Her focus is to arouse in the viewer the conviction of a reality which exists in the spaces between words and images; intuitive gaps and leaps of faith, text and voice over time, and the disassociations and non-linearities of thought-play and choice – a digital rendering of mind and universe.
She has exhibited work at Terrain Biennial, Woman Made Gallery, Blink Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, UCLA, Chicago Cultural Center, Krasl Museum, Artprize, Chicago Art Expo, International Digital Media Arts Association, International Organization of Lettering Artists, Monkey Town NYC, The Center on Halsted, Poetic Justice League, eNarrative Roundtable Boston, the College Art Association, SIGGRAPH and many others.
Niki Nolin received the Distinguished Teaching Fellowship from Columbia College Chicago and is an associate professor in the Art and Art History Department and a member of the Greenleaf Art Center community in Rogers Park. She holds an MFA in art and technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BFA in painting from Rockford University.
© Niki Nolin