Nathan Anthony

Lives and works in Helena, MT

Artist statement

I use the inherently haptic nature of making sculptures to explore the relationship between handmade and mechanised production. In doing so, I leverage this relationship to imagine the studio as a scaled-down model of a factory wherein I act as the sole, unchecked employee, creatively misusing resources towards sculptural ends. I see the artworks that come out of this as aberrations or factory errors, Fordist glitches that subtly highlight the elaborate specificity of industrialized objects whose repetition all too often obviates close looking. For example in 'Calendar Object', I continuously (mis)used a MIG welder like a hand-operated 3D printer or coil pot, stacking circular welds on top of one another to slowly build up layers of steel into a spindly organic form. The resulting object was suspended horizontally between two prongs over a steel I-beam, installed museologically like a geologic specimen that recorded a timeline of my artistic labor. 'Calendar Object' highlighted the same material--steel--in different states: handmade versus industrial. In "Block" and "Stack," I produced my own bootlegged, mock-version of plasticine oil clay—a trademarked material—on a small scale by extruding actual clay through a custom die to build absurd, grotesque forms. The clay begins to take on expressive qualities that recall architectural, bodily and painterly conventions. My works operate in varied representational modes from icon, to symbol, to index. In exhibitions, I juxtapose...

Artwork