Bio
Born in St Louis, Missouri in 1989, Nicholas Missel graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute with a BFA in Sculpture before going on to study at the Rhode Island School of Design, where Missel attended as a Jack Kent Cooke Scholar, acquiring an MFA in Sculpture. After Graduating in 2016, Missel attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. At Skowhegan he discovered his ‘Negatives’ series that has continued to evolve and inform his work to the present. In 2018, Missel exhibited two large sculptures from this series, a cast Bobcat and Tractor, at the Socrates Sculpture Park, NY.
Missel’s approach is unique, seeing the work as a form of ‘cultural archeology of the working class’ choosing objects that sit on the periphery of our attention and wanting to give them new life. Like the negative of a photograph the objects maintain a similarity to their original form but transform to have their own identity grounded in an undefined terrain of present, past, and future. “I wanted to make responsive sculptures that you could interact with” and silicone has become an integral part of the work for Missel.
His work is influenced by an Anthropocentric worldview based on the human effect on the earth, “ where objects melt, are in a state of plasma, infinitely malleable, and past identities are erased and new identities are formed.” The sculptures are otherworldly, almost digital, transporting you to the realm of fantasy while simultaneously grounded in the real through the texture and forms of the remnants of the objects they come from.