Nina Katchadourian's playful yet earnest explorations of social structures and relationships in her art practice often develop into ongoing projects that consist of smaller series of works.
Read MoreSeveral of Nina Katchadourian's earlier works engage with notions of networks and relationships. In 1998, the artist mended broken spiderwebs with red thread in what came to be the 'Mended Spiderweb' series. In the mornings following her repairs, Katchadourian would discover that the spiders had discarded her amendments by reconstructing the webs with their own methods. Photographs of the intact spiderwebs and rejected patches are often exhibited together.
The 'Mended Spiderweb' series is also part of a larger project, 'Uninvited Collaboration with Nature', in which Katchadourian intervenes on nature in idiosyncratic ways, such as creating moustaches out of caterpillars ('Natural Crossdressing', 2002).
In 'Paranormal Postcards', ongoing since 2001, Katchadourian stitches postcards with red thread to establish imagined relationships between various elements of each image, drawing red dotted lines to connect the groups of postcards assembled on a wall. 'The Genealogy of the Supermarket', which she began in 2005, similarly involves the artist creating a network out of commercial product icons—this time, a family tree that connects such figures as Aunt Jemima and Quaker Oats.
Nina Katchadourian often works with the connotations and expansive nature of language. In the 'Sorted Books' project (1993–ongoing), the artist arranges books from personal or public collections to create humorous or ominous sentences out of their titles. The final results, shown as photographs or as installations of stacks of books, reveal elements of their owner's personality or the library's focus.
In the six-screen video installation Accent Elimination (2005), Katchadourian and her foreign-born parents practice each other's accents. By tracing the origins of her parents' accents—Finland for her mother and Armenia for her father—the artist explores the association between language and themes of diaspora, immigration, and displacement through intimate family moments. Accent Elimination was exhibited in the Armenian Pavilion in the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), and won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation.
Nina Katchadourian considers political alternatives in Monument to the Unelected, in which she redesigns campaign signs by every U.S. presidential candidate who had ever lost their bid for election. Originally commissioned by Arizona's Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art for the 2008 exhibition Seriously Funny, Katchadourian's work has since been exhibited every four years to coincide with the U.S. presidential election. In 2020, following the 59th presidential election, the artist invited 8 first-time voters to help add new signs to the work.
While on a flight in 2010, Nina Katchadourian began to employ the objects around her, including in-flight magazines, to create strangely familiar yet baffling scenes. Captured in the photographic series 'Seat Assignment', these vignettes range from a half-eaten sandwich casting shadows over an image of a skier to the artist's finger pushing through the mouth of a picture of a cat.
'Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style', initiated in 2011, is a sub-series of 'Seat Assignment' that saw the artist take selfies in an airplane bathroom. Using hand towels, toilet seat covers, and pieces of clothing as props, Katchadourian recreated the solemn sensibilities associated with historical portraits.
'Seat Assignment' was first presented at Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand (2011), and travelled to San Francisco (2012); Ohio and London (2014); Arkansas (2016); and Tammisaari, Finland (2019).
Nina Katchadourian holds a BA from Brown University (1989) and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego (1993). Based in Boerum Hill, New York City, since 1997, the artist teaches at the Gallatin School of Individualised Study at New York University.
Nina Katchadourian held All Forms of Attraction, her first museum retrospective exhibition, at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, New York, in 2006. Curiouser, a touring survey exhibition, first opened at the Blanton Museum, Texas, in 2017. It traveled to the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Arts Centre for Visual Arts at Stanford University later that year, and to the Brigham Young Museum of Art in Utah in 2018.
Selected solo exhibitions include Nina Katchadourian: Cumulus, Pace Gallery, New York (2021); To Feel Something That Was Not of Our World, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco (2020); Twitchers and Cheaters, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2019); Nina Katchadourian: Der Krawall, Die Überraschung, Das Seepferdchen, Die Raum, Berlin (2018); Kansas Cut-Up, Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville (2015); Cerca Series: Nina Katchadourian, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2008); Works Made in Finland by Nina Katchadourian, Turku Art Museum, Finland (2006); Natural Car Alarms, Sculpture Centre, New York (2002).
Katchadourian's work has also been featured in group exhibitions, such as Copycat, San Francisco State University Fine Arts Gallery (2019); Creatures: When Species Meet, Contemporary Arts Centre, Ohio (2019); Talking Pictures: Camera-Phone Conversations Between Artists, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2017); Dust Gathering, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (2017); Floater Theater, The Exploratorium, San Francisco (2017); California and the West: Photography from the Campaign for Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) (2016); Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond, Brooklyn Museum, New York (2014); Paper, Saatchi Gallery, London (2013); Ensemble, Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art (2007).
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2021
