Nick Mittelstead is a Philadelphia based artist working in mixed-media practices that focus on the passage of time, death, and materiality. He received an MFA in Studio Art and an MA in History and Theory of Contemporary Art from The San Francisco Art Institute and a BS in Studio Art from Skidmore College. She has shown in the US and abroad, exhibiting work at SPRING/BREAK, Vox Populi, and R Gallery. They were a recipient of a Cadogan Fellowship and have attended the Vermont Studio Center and the Mudhouse Residency.
Artist Statement:
Within its chrysalis a caterpillar dissolves completely. Enzymes break the caterpillar down into a near-liquid that ultimately reshapes itself into a butterfly. Though the butterfly and the caterpillar are two separate organisms, butterflies actually have fleeting memories from their time as caterpillars. Despite disappearing entirely, the caterpillar is not fully negated. For us though, disappearing can feel like total negation. Death seems final and promises of afterlife bring little comfort. Is death truly final? We are a part of an endless cycle of materiality – our atoms and molecules were things before us and they will be things after us. Are we like caterpillars; our lives impermanent while our matter perpetual? Is that matter then infused with memory? My work seeks to reproduce metamorphic materiality and the cascading memory within materials to reimagine mortality with optimism.
To express this metamorphosis and cascade, I reinvigorate historical practices, objects, and stories using new disciplines. My work looks to animal fat rendering, plant grafting, and tillage. It pulls from out-of-date thinking, ancient cure-alls, and debunked psychology studies. It uses legacy tech such as magnetic tape, CRT monitors, and FM transmission. All of these things are subjected to reconfiguration by contemporary technology, making practices, and thinking. Digital image manipulation, artificial intelligence, and generative audio become new material substrates for history. My works oscillate between knowledge from the past in new material forms and materials from the past articulating the present. In doing so, the work suggests that material retains its history in spite of its changing form, implying existence after death.