As night spills into day
nick bustamante
June 7 - July 20, 2019
Coolspace @ artspace
Night and day, dark and light, now and then, inside and out…these antonyms of existence--the in between moments when past slips into present--are what Ruston Artist and Louisiana Tech Art professor Nick Bustamante explores in his latest exhibition, “AS NIGHT SPILLS INTO DAY.”
Bustamante is most often described as a landscape painter, but with this exhibition he says he is depicting the varied terrain of our inner lives. “As Night Spills Into Day explores ideas of home, loss and family roles in a non-linear narrative format,” says Bustamante. The exhibition will be hung in a setting to resemble both the interior and exterior of a family home with more than 100 images, some hung in groupings as one might remember they hung in the home where you grew up.
STATEMENT FROM THE ARTIST
It is December and I am back home in the deserts of southern California visiting my mom for the last time. In front of my house, crows fill the sky. After the passing of my mother, the structure of my family changed while also changing my ideas and understanding of home, love, and faith along with it.
Crows are often considered the bearers of prophecy. One example of this is the nursery rhyme Counting Crows, which encompasses fear, struggle, love, loss, longing and change. I have always been interested in how we use superstitions to make sense of experiences that we cannot control. In this body of work I use crows metaphorically. They are incredibly intelligent animals that share many similarities with humans. In the realm of mythology and folklore the crow and raven are complex creatures. Appearing in varied contexts and with symbolic ambiguity, they are playful and solemn, noisy and articulate, sacred and profane and capable of both good and evil.
I believe the past is our constant companion, forever influencing our present and future. I revisit that moment in December often; the cold dry air, the creaky door that always gets stuck, the sound of crows cawing filling the air, the feel of sand underneath my nails. I am interested in how we attach meaning to objects and places and how these meanings are fluid and often impossible to pin down. The storytelling aspects of the pieces are meant to be nonlinear to allow the viewer to complete the story using their own personal histories.
EXHIBITING ARTIST:
Nick Bustamante
ARTIST BIO
Bustamante, who is originally from California, is chair of the Studio Art program in the School of Design. He is also one of the founding professors in the VISTA (Visual Integration of Science Through Art) program, which offers minors in pre-medical illustration and scientific visualization.
Bustamante is a nationally recognized painter who has had 16 solo exhibitions and has been included in 38 group exhibitions. Bustamante’s medical illustrations have been published in textbooks and research journals such as the American Chemical Society. Within the last five years he has completed 12 large-scale murals throughout north Louisiana.
“I have lived in Louisiana for 15 years,” says Bustamante. “The barren desert landscape of Los Angeles had a huge influence on me growing up, but it is a sharp contrast to the lush, green landscape of my Louisiana home. This exhibition is about those contrasts – about loss, retracing the past, and defining new family roles.”
