Sell Out, A Series: 5 Questions with Christian Nicolay
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Sell Out is a series by interdisciplinary artist Angela Fama (she/they), who co-creates conversations with individual artists across Vancouver. Questioning ideas of artistry, identity, “day jobs,” and how they intertwine, Fama settles in with each artist (at a local café of their choice) and asks the same series of questions. With one roll of medium format film, Fama captures portraits of the artist after their conversations.
Christian Nicolay (he/him) is an interdisciplinary artist and gallery technician, a second generation settler with Northern and Western European roots. Follow him on Instagram (@nicolaychristian), or visit his website at www.christiannicolay.com.
Location: DICED Discovery Cafe
What do you make/create?
As an interdisciplinary artist, I’ve been thinking about what encapsulates what I make and create through a multitude of media. I’ve been thinking about time capsules; how they are deliberate methods of creativity through the use of various media to communicate, connect, and share. They have elements of the unknown, and are observations around the measures of time. My current ongoing body of work and research, around the environment and climate change, revolves around materials that speak to qualities of the observations of the measures of time - to things like the temporary, permanence, cycles, and transition.
I often salvage and repurpose material in my work, which is a strategy of regarding the disregarded. Often, wherever I happen to be in my environment, paying attention and listening to where I am has an impact on what I make and create.
What do you do to support that?
Walking. Walking is an integral part of my practice, a form of mediation that helps keep me grounded.
For a day job, I’ve been a freelance gallery technician, preparator, and custom art framer for over twenty years. I’ve worked with a lot of different artists, curators, cultural producers, and creators in a multitude of various spaces. Everything from hanging shows, lighting shows, building plinths and crates, framing works, doing inventory, painting the gallery walls—the underbelly of the art world, so to speak. I’m often hanging the permanent collection for VGH-UBC Foundation; you can find me at the hospital, or university, bolting artworks to the walls.
To support my art practice, on a deeper level, I’ve been thinking about doing new things, in new spaces, and challenging myself. I almost drowned when I was very little and I’ve had a fear of water my entire life, and I find myself doing aquafit these days. It immediately takes me out of my comfort zone and challenges my deep-rooted fears. It’s surreal: doing aerobics, with a floatation device, listening to pop music blaring from a ghetto blaster (I think it’s a ghettoblaster, in my mind) early in the morning. It’s dreamlike. I find it extremely invigorating, very challenging and rewarding. So, getting to the root of that, to support my practice, doing uncomfortable things in unfamiliar places is a way of being vulnerable and working at getting to know myself better. Doing that, I feel I can be more sincere within my practice.
Describe something about how your art practice and your “day job” interact.
They are intrinsically interwoven and interlinked and have been that way for so long. I’ve worked hard to make it that way. Very early on, I always saw my day job as a studio, or a canvas. It was an opportunity to have a new set of tools, experiences, people to connect with, share, and learn from. I don’t really see a separation between my day job and my practice. I see a link, a unity; one informs the other.
What’s a challenge you’re facing, or have faced, in relation to this and/or what’s a benefit?
I see that altogether in one question with how they’re linked. I’m focusing more on benefits these days. I see the challenges and benefits are interwoven - like, a challenge would be that sometimes I’m hanging a work, or working with artists, and their work is not always my cup of tea, and it’s my responsibility to try and do a good job, and hang their work, present it, and help tell their story as best I can. That can be a challenge. However, that’s something I also see as a benefit, because I get to (and I’m grateful that I have the opportunity to) work with that. It involves a lot of patience, listening, and working with people. Even if it’s not my cup of tea, I’m still able to learn something. I’m able to see through so many different lenses, to learn about so many different forms of creativity and storytelling that are not necessarily part of my practice. I’m constantly being surprised. I’m always curious, always learning. Through being challenged with questioning “what is art,” “what is good” or “bad,” “do I like it,” there’s a lot to be learned there. I’ve developed a lot of respect for different forms of creativity through a multitude of different stories.
Problem solving is also a challenge. Here’s a space, and we’d like you to hang an exhibition, but it’s a heritage building and you’re not allowed to put any nails in the walls. Hmm. How do you hang a show where you can’t put any nails in the walls? However, again, that challenge becomes an opportunity, a benefit: How do you work through these things? How do you work with different artists and spaces to present and show work? Different spaces have different languages and there’s a lot that can be learnt from those, from what seem like problems that end up being possibilities.
I learn a lot from the artists and curators I work with. They perpetually teach me new ways of understanding creativity and storytelling. Bringing these things that I’ve learnt through working with these artists, curators, and spaces back to my own practice, when I’m looking at, making, or presenting my own work, I have more glasses to view through. I’m able to see through a lot of different lenses because I’ve been trying on so many other pairs of glasses.
Have you made, or created, anything that was inspired by something from your day job? Please describe.
Yes. I’ve been able to salvage and repurpose a lot of material from my day job. There’s always off-cuts from framing—glass, wood—all kinds of things that I end up using in my practice in a variety of ways.
I get to see a lot of different spaces. While I’m in them, I’m always looking for the disregarded, the quiet, the mundane: paper ephemera, stuff that is probably going to end up in the landfill, or is in the recycling bin. I’m often salvaging and repurposing material from these spaces. For example, when I was working at a gallery, they asked me to help organize their storage area. They had all these off-cuts of glass that had been sitting there for years apparently, and they wanted to just throw them away. The glass would have ended up in a landfill, and I thought, “I can definitely use this.” I ended up bringing that glass back to the studio, cutting it with a glass cutter that I had previously found, and using those cut sheets of glass for some of the work in my recent exhibition integrating ceramics at the Shadbolt Centre.
Something that I love about working at the hospital is the interactions with patients and staff. How much I hear how important the art is, how vital it is, to that environment. It’s not an art gallery - it’s a different kind of space where creativity thrives in a special way.
Things that I find in the corridors of the hospital, like elastic bands that have been there for fifty years, and off cuts from another gallery ended up in this recent exhibition. Things that were destined for the landfill ended up in these glass boxes with my ceramics, again, regarding the disregarded. This is also in relation to time capsules, observations in the measure of time, stories that inscribe themselves on surfaces. I’m attracted to these things. It's these everyday, ordinary objects that I’m integrating into my fine art practice.
When I was deinstalling and cleaning up after this exhibition, because it’s a multi-purpose space, there was a wedding going on in the adjacent conference room. It was very busy there, with all this activity. There was a man looking for things to prop up wedding signs, and he ended up going for some of my ceramics works that were shaped like chalk brushes and bricks in order to use them as shims for their signs. I had to interject and politely inform the man that these normal, everyday objects are actually artwork. He said, “Oh, excuse me, sorry.” I said “no problem” with a smile. Then he came up to me after and we had a talk about the space and how he had never been there before. We talked about art and creativity, how important and vital that is, and so we both got to see through each other’s eyes in a different way.
Angela Fama (she/they) is an artist, Death Conversation Game entrepreneur, photographer, musician, previous small-business server of many years (The Templeton, Slickity Jim’s etc.). They are a mixed European 2nd-generation settler currently working on the unceded traditional territory of the Coast Salish xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations.
Follow them at IG @angelafama IG @deathconversationgame or on their website www.angelafama.com
