Nicolaus Chaffin

Nicolaus Chaffin is a multidisciplinary artist currently living in Oakland, California. Through combining modes of drawing, sculpture, performance, and installation, Chaffin’s practice centers the sensations of a visceral life as a tactic for examining strategies of queer communication and labor. Chaffin enlists common construction materials and methods of working which embrace wear, marred surfaces, stains, failure, and complete disruption through performative productions and actions. Chaffin views his practice as a meditation on the invisible labor of his queer forefolx, those who envisioned the utopic through experimentation as well as those who sought the future through the radical act of survival. While at Bemis, Chaffin will work on immersive, participatory landscapes which act as both large-scale action drawings and co-authored movement scores. In response to their disruptions, Chaffin will apply new compositions to the previously rendered grounds until the works become saturated with visual layers of occupancy.