YOU ARE HERE
NICK SATINOVER
3/3/23-4/15/23
The Weather Station is pleased to present You Are Here, an exhibition of recent prints by Nick Satinover. Working in a variety of media, Satinover’s diaristic practice combines visual pattern, text, layered color and juxtaposition to create a singular visual language. You Are Here brings together the artist’s first substantial body of work created through the risograph process.
You Are Here functions like a calendar, visualizing a period that Satinover (like all of us) experienced in isolation, while simultaneously documenting the artist’s developing relationship with new processes. Towards the beginning of the pandemic lockdown, Satinover acquired an MH9450 risograph printer for the Art Department at Middle Tennessee State University, where he works as a professor of printmaking. Challenging himself to produce one risograph print per week in order to adapt to a new medium, he created You Are Here, a suite of 52 prints over the course of one year. In this series, time is marked not only by a weekly production, but by the recurring vertical divisions within each image, breaking compositions into “pages” to be read as well as viewed. This series marks a departure from the artist’s more familiar methods of analogue production, with Satinover creating digital compositions at home while socially distancing with his family, and then traveling to a mostly deserted college campus to print them.
With this work the artist develops a new language within a new reality, further described by the text fragments flickering through each piece. Phrases like the unknowable present and uncertainty an always present passenger speak to the anxieties of living through a pandemic, while poor seasons in pleasant company gesture towards the unexpected pleasures of isolating with loved ones. Patterns, layers of color, and cast shadows also move through the work, occasionally punctuated by fluorescents, creating, in the words the artist, “a mixture of candy with medicine.” The title of this series - You Are Here - locates the body in space, but also became a kind of mantra for the Satinover during the pandemic’s radical disruption of both public and private life. By exhibiting this work in a public sphere, the phrase You Are Here yields new resonance, now addressing both an audience as well as our post-COVID present. For this exhibition, the entire series of 52 pieces will be exhibited together for the first time.
A self-described “infinitely curious maker of things,” Nick Satinover currently resides outside of Nashville, TN. He works across media but is most often found within a printmaking studio. He earned his BFA from Wright State University in Dayton, OH, and his MFA from Illinois State University in Normal, IL. He has been an artist-in-residence at Frans Masereel Centrum in Kasterlee, Belgium, the Kala Arts Center, Berkeley, CA, In-Cahoots, in Petaluma, CA, and the Mass MoCA in North Adams, MA. He has exhibited his work widely in juried, group and solo exhibitions across the United States. He is currently an Associate Professor of Print Media at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro where he also coordinates the studio art BFA degree. He shares a home with his twin boys, partner Brittany, and rescue animals Neko and Gracie. His work is represented by Colibri Gallery in Morgan Hill, CA, and Manneken Press in Bloomington, IL. In addition to an independent practice, Nick also collaborates on a long-distance conceptual print/performance/publishing project with Tampa, FL artist Ry McCullough called small_bars.