Chillin' with Nico Gardner

By Joe Dwyer     9/30/10 7:00pm

One afternoon last week I sat down with recent Rice grad Nico Gardner (Lovett '10) at the Brochstein Pavilion to talk about what he'd been up to lately. The last time Nico was in the Thresher was back in February for his installation at the student-run Matchbox Gallery ("Intersections: Houston draws lines at Matchbox Gallery," Feb. 5), and now he was just coming off a summer residency at Project Row Houses in Houston, where he had another installation on public display.While we waited on Salento to make Nico's sandwich, I asked him a bit about how he ended up at PRH for the summer and how he came up with the concept for his installation. Initially nominated by Visual and Dramatic Arts Professor John Sparagana, Nico then had to apply to PRH and was accepted to the residency program soon afterward. Best described as a giant marionette, Nico's installation looks like a sort of shaggy creature that can be controlled and manipulated by the viewer via a simple rope and pulley system that runs across the installation space.

"It's really more of an interaction between the puppet and the viewer. Those are what pushed and pulled off each other and were contingent on each other to make the piece," Gardner said.

Looking at the pictures and the execution of the installation, one could assume that Nico had been working in sculpture and structural artwork for some time, but he originally worked in oil paints before switching to structure-based art, mostly because the oil paints made Nico feel like he "was dying inside because they're so chemically based."

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In between bites of sandwich, Nico also explained how his characteristic use of string in his more recent projects came about from a random conversation with his sister that led her to share her stash that she'd been keeping from the bundles of mail that come through her office.

"She's a packrat, and so she kept giving me all this string and I just started tying them in knots and that's where it came from. I realized that I liked the properties of it; I liked that it was unbleached and that it was really simple in that it was just wound-up cotton ... I've gone from painting to this and it's a lot like building a structure and stretching canvas across it, because it's just a blank surface you can play on. "Then my senior-year paranoia kicked in and I had to ask Nico about post-grad life. What about things like jobs? How well did his time at Rice shape what he's doing now?

"It's weird getting into the art scene in Houston," Gardner admitted. "After the show at [PRH] this artist that came to do a critique at one point asked me to do this show in spring at some park, so it's just word of mouth and connections and whether or not they like you."

Nico went on to talk about how even chance encounters can lead to opportunities - while joking with a stranger in line about the sandwiches at Whole Foods, the man Gardner was talking to actually turned out to be Dennis Nance, one of the directors at the Lawndale Art Center, who then encouraged Gardner to apply to the center.

"Talk to everybody that you don't know because I don't think he would have ever said anything if I didn't start talking to him," Gardner said.

As for his years at Rice, Nico said they were helpful.

"I wouldn't be doing this now if I hadn't gone through this process. It led to something."

Joe Dwyer is a Wiess College senior and Thresher A&E editor.

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