Haleigh Nickerson

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

Nickerson draws from her background as a filmmaker deconstructing the act of world-building as her work materializes in representational agglomerations that teeter between personal fantasy, archive, culture, and memory. Her photography, video, performance, and installations exist as compilations of emblematic images, objects, and symbols that coalesce into shifting spaces of identity. Dedicated characters are embodied in these realms, often in fantastical tribute to the strength of Black womxn icons in American culture. Through this practice of reclamation, Nickerson offers visionary frameworks of survival, transformation, and care along the lines of race and gender in America. "My work explores intersections of race, gender, self representation, desire, and power through photography, video, installation, sculpture and performance. My practice is an ongoing investigation of performing the body. I am interested in constructions of black female identity and blackness. I understand the essence of this ‘construction’ as the many icons, images, archetypes, making and compiling of stored information, and objects that inform our memory, awareness, and contribute, in totality, to the making of ourselves. Through embodiment and thebody/self, I question where our agency lays in different spaces. There is an attempt in further reclaiming one’s own black female body. The characters range from ‘amalgamations’ of blackfemale historical, pop cultural, projections, personal and imagined...

Artwork