JEFF NILAN
Lecturer, PhotographyRB 213
Phone: 859.257.3280
Education: M.F.A. Indiana University
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(click images to view)
For the past eight years I have been working on a project that focuses on the people, landscape, and structures of rural southwestern Iowa. The project includes black and white and color photographs, artist’s books, video, as well as alternative photographic processes. My recent work uses salted paper prints and cyanotypes printed with litho crayon rubbings as the negatives.
The rubbings are derived from out-buildings and various small structures found on my relative’s farms in Cass County, Iowa, a rural farm community in decline. I am interested in the literal forms; the visual texture of a farm house window screen, the edge quality and surface texture of a chicken coup and the scale of a cattle feeding trough. The first step in the process, the crayon rubbing onto paper, results in an actual size ‘fingerprint’ image of the structure. When the paper is pinned to the building, concealing the building below, and the crayon passes over it, what appears is a revelation, as if the image materializes from behind a curtain.
For me, standing in the presence of these small structures is enough to evoke the religion, stoicism, beauty and sadness of a rural society made anemic and confused by how it fits into our contemporary consumer culture. The rubbing prints become a way to infuse the structure with the things I think and feel when I look at the vernacular forms of this region. I see the slow, methodical processes involved in acquiring the rubbings and exposing the final prints with sunlight as a way for the energy engraved into the worn wooden structures to be relived.
Jeff Nilan received his MFA from Indiana University in 1999 where he also taught for a number of years as Visiting Assistant Professor. Growing up in Nebraska, Jeff’s art draws influence from his roots and upbringing, as well as the landscape and culture of the Midwest. His photographs and artists’ books have been shown throughout the United States, and he has received several grants and awards for his work including Indiana Arts Commission and Nexus press in Atlanta.