Nick

Larsen

In the unforgiving yet enchanting deserts of the American Southwest, Nick Larsen conjures his distinctive style of collage. With a keen eye, he marries found objects and digital prints, giving birth to geometric mixed-media assemblages that are bound together by delicate threads. As a bold explorer traversing the diverse American terrain, Larsen embarks on a journey to uncover hidden significance within the nation's most enigmatic recesses.

Collage is a way of pulling from what already exists to visualize something that doesn't. Collage is speculative; it's a place of fiction and fantasy cobbled together from what's at hand to suggest, propose, or evoke something bigger.

Nick Larsen

The desert is a place defined by what it lacks, its bleakness an invitation to project and speculate, to imagine new possibilities in the abandoned mining structures and boarded-up brothels. It’s a place where raw materials are hard to come by and unexpected improvisations are necessary to fulfill material needs. From this strategy of making do, the resulting objects hold both their current form and the residue of their previous lives; I want my collages—pieced together from what’s at hand to suggest a possibly unattainable fantasy—to do the same thing. In the no man’s land between fictional archaeological inventory and autobiography, I’ve found terrain to map and mine both what’s present and visible in the desert landscape and, maybe more importantly, what isn’t.

Nick Larsen

Nick Larsen was born in 1982 in Reno, Nevada, USA. He is currently based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.

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