Nika Feldman

Lives and works in Santa Fe, NM

Artist statement

As an interdisciplinary textile artist, my work centers around three concepts I have constructed: sartorial sabotage, schmatte prowess, and feminist chutzpah, all of which locate my practice within a framework based on my gender, socioeconomic background, and Jewish cultural heritage. My work contextualizes the exploitation of land and labor through the rag business from personal, professional, and familial lived experiences as well as ancestral associations. I use salvaged clothes, which act as both subject and medium to address issues of slow violence prevalent in all aspects of mainstream textile and fashion production from seed to seam and beyond. Clothing acts as an indexical agent, allowing us to read the textiles as a form of text, as an embodied material, and as a messenger carrying coded communication. As an artist, I position myself as an activator and mediator. In doing so, the role of art and the artist are redefined to be verb-based rather than noun-based. In this way, my practice references actions taken such as casting spells or performances of prayer, thus eliminating the polemic role of the viewer from completing the work. Instead, art is understood to be the engagement between the artist and the material, each possessing their own agency in relation to one another. As such, art is the process of shifting energies that occurs during the act of making rather than the more common association with the completed object.

Artwork