NICHOLAS SITTER

EDUCATION

Savannah College of Art and Design, BFA Cum Laude, 2000

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

Kaviar and Kind (Roseark) Gallery, West Hollywood, CA

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

bG Gallery, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, CA

Glass Garage Gallery, West Hollywood, CA

PRIVATE COMMISSIONS

Chess and Burman Salon Studio 14
Josh Brolin
Steve Tyler
Troy Polamalu

The Floriculture concept started as an attempt to take the guerrilla attitude of street art and contrast it with a mature technique and a lyrical subject. This tension between the renegade and the poetic, between the destructive and the creative, between graffiti and grace, is what I find exciting about public art and about urban living.

The subtext of these pieces is "Nature as Metaphor." I thought about urban development "beautification projects" that focused on planting greenery and flowers in intensely developed areas. As I researched these floral forms, I realized that the introduction of floral elements was not an escapist attempt to suburbanize an urban space, as I learned just how "human" floral plants are. They can be ugly or attractive depending on who's looking at them. They have personalities, intuitions, and behavioral patterns, which can be ugly or attractive, too. They can be finicky or indiscriminate regarding where they live. They can be confrontational or harmonious with their neighbors. They can make love to themselves or with others. They are creative, innovative, and indifferent. They are committed as well as exclusionary. They can be open and withdrawn. Deadly and serene. Vain and introverted. They can break through concrete or wither to the touch.

Further, I wanted to look at the concept of what makes art art, by examining the history of floral depictions. Floral still-lifes have a long tradition in canonical art. They bring the outdoors inside. They capture, control, and conquer nature and natural rhythms of decay. Street art challenges such cultural institutional biases by bringing outside what is normally kept inside. The Floriculture series further breaks down the barriers between outside and inside by throwing a gilt frame over portions of the florals. The silent question the frames pose is, "Why does throwing a frame over something make it art and not graffiti?"

Floriculture thus attempts to function as metaphor for the gorgeous riot of contradictions that is urban living and urban art.