Wednesday, October 23 to Saturday, November 30, 2024

Artist’s talk: Wednesday, Oct. 23, 5 to 6 p.m.
Opening reception: Wednesday, Oct. 23, 6 to 8 p.m.

The Mueller Gallery at Caldwell University is excited to present “Special Dust”, a solo exhibition featuring artist Nick Lamia. The exhibition will be held from Wednesday, Oct. 23 to Saturday, Nov. 30. An artist’s talk will take place at the Mueller Gallery on Wednesday, Oct. 23 from 5 to 6 p.m., followed by a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Overlaps of nature and society fascinate Lamia and inspire his art. Despite the abstract appearance of his work, all of his imagery is rooted in real, lived experience. He collects information by drawing and painting recognizable subjects and scenes in plain air and then uses memory and intuition to create studio artwork that evokes, rather than illustrates, the intertwining of society with nature. Linear, diagrammatic structures and flat planes of color are metaphors for the constructed world, while irregular, organic contours and passages of atmospheric, translucent paint represent nature. “I’ve been inspired by experiences hiking remote glaciers, wading urban trout streams and sailing boats through storms at sea. But regardless of the underlying subject matter, I enjoy when pictures appear to depict objects or situations that are almost recognizable but that, like ultraviolet light flickering just outside our range of perception, remain tantalizingly beyond our ability to identify them specifically. At their best, my images tease our sense of familiarity while refusing to be pinned down with certainty,” Lamia says.

Benjamin Fernandez ’24, a senior and studio art major, and assistant to Mueller Gallery director Suzanne Kammin Baron, says, “Lamia integrates his background in environmental science and his appreciation of the landscape into his confluences of the natural and the manmade that are developed through an amalgamation of constructed and gestural forms. His flattened environments of line, shape, and color waver between recognition of a visited space and the manifestation of a transcendent realm.”

Nick Lamia is an award-winning artist whose work includes drawing, painting, printmaking, installation and sculpture. Despite its non-objective appearance, all of his artwork is based on real, lived experience, often involving outdoor adventures in the mountains and on the ocean. His artworks are metaphoric representations of the overlap of the natural world with the constructed world of man. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, as well as residencies at Wave Hill, the MacDowell Colony, the Robert Blackburn Print Workshop and the Triangle Artists Association. 500 of his small-scale drawings were included in the inaugural Bronx Museum Biennial in 2011. His recent solo exhibitions include “Cloud Architecture” at Planthouse Gallery in New York and “The Tailwaters Project” at the AVA Gallery in New Hampshire, the latter for which proceeds went to supporting the Greater Upper Valley chapter of Trout Unlimited and their ongoing effort to protect and restore cold water fisheries and watersheds.

The Mueller Gallery is open Monday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Visit here for directions.