Sheila Nicolin explores the very human struggle to find intimate connection. Narrated from a naive and voyeuristic perspective, Sheila’s paintings create surrealist glimpses into authentic and vulnerable experience.
All of Sheila’s works are studied and imagined in real time, but distorted and edited subjectively in the same nature as memory. As she interacts with friends, family and acquaintances, she studies and documents via photography, writing and sketching. Her work acts as an actively-lived retrospective, a fictionalized reality and an attempt to understand those around her. The human form is represented in a way akin to wilderness: both familiar and inviting, but also alien and wildly inaccessible. Using expressive mark-making, garish color and dissociative pattern, Sheila creates an unreliable and sometimes skewed story of intimacy. This work exists as a unique marriage between a commercial design background and a focused artistic vision, which results in a body of work that reimagines traditional pop art through the generational lens of overwhelmed and disjointed interactions within a world of constant stimulation. This humanist appeal to the universal “you” builds a coming-of-age narrative with a relatable goal: to find honest connection with other humans in the most humanly flawed way—dishonestly and skewed and drenched in contemporary culture.
