Nicole Rademacher

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

A gate admits and refuses. A filter removes and puts something else in its place. Erasure creates both debris and disappearance. Image and sound resist synchronization, producing no single version. Translation drifts. And documents contradict one another, with none allowed to win. Through video, drawing, installation, photography, ceramics, and participatory structures, I make work where different forms of evidence produce incompatible accounts. Family photographs, my brothers' memories of a house I never entered, bureaucratic documents, an audio recording of my own sobbing, the graphite an eraser leaves behind: each makes a claim, but none settle what happened, who belongs, or what can be known. For decades, I have been considering these questions through my work. A typewriter carriage decided where a story broke. Family members’ stories were cut apart and reassembled; no single account governed the narratives. Across unrelated locations and encounters, small movements between bodies recurred while the circumstances around them remained distinct. I invent parameters. I listen to the materials, which have their own logic. Vellum transmits, obscures, and shifts with air. Classification determines what can move, what must remain, and who is permitted to decide. These are not illustrations of uncertainty. They are its conditions. Born to one set of parents and adopted by another. My adoption was closed. That is one structure where identity can be authored by institutions and...

Artwork