In the basement below Broadway’s Frosty Darling, in a small gallery that opened quietly a few months ago, Travis Nikolai has installed a new exhibit of multi-media paintings entitled Hot Young Suicides: Audition for the 27 Club. Those who visited Artists of Utah’s 35 x 35 exhibit last year will remember Nikolai’s refrigerator-based installation “Pan-Gallactic Reality,” which won a People’s Choice award. In this interview, recorded at that time, Nikolai discusses his thematic interests, the appeal of material-based work and his movement between painting and installation. In his current show at the Stolen and Escaped Gallery, Nikolai’s rough and frequently dark works focus “on feelings of misanthropy, outsider-ness, depression, death and most specifically suicide.” The artist has dedicated the exhibit to “all those [gay, lesbian and transgender] who have recently ended their lives, pointless casualties in what is so obviously the great civil rights struggle of our day.”
Hot Young Suicides: Audition for the 27 Club is at the Stolen and Escaped Gallery (117 East 300 South) through November 15.
UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.
