Tucker Nichols’ flower paintings are monuments to unarticulated emotions. A thistle-colored vase posted on social media is the center of a galaxy bursting with floral colors. Fuchsia, lilac and lavender petals are caught in mid-orbit on the canvas.
They appear to be floating above the vase, the buds, stems and corollas all defying gravity. Everything’s about to collide, but not before the artist holds each splash of color in stasis. The caption reads, “Flowers for anyone neck deep in a sketchy situation.”
Two years ago, Nichols published his book, Flowers for Things I Don’t Know How to Say. In it, his approach is the same. He pairs a flower painting with a short evocative phrase. This proclivity for uniting imagery with texts informs In Other Words, the exhibit he’s curated at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art.
Each artist included in this group show incorporates words, or shapes that suggest them, within a larger canvas, sculpture or mural.
In person, Nichols takes a reverential tone when he speaks about the practice of his fellow artists. He points to, what appears to be, a large wooden door. Using a utility knife, the late artist Nathan Cordero carved a “slogan” onto its surface. The letters are fat and exaggerated in a way that makes them hard to read. Playing with negative and positive space, the words also meet each other going backwards and forwards. Nichols reads the energy of the carved phrase as “a really gentle beautiful plea of, ‘Don’t leave me. Let’s not be alone in this world. Let’s be in contact.’”
Ed Ruscha is the guiding spirit presiding over In Other Words. There’s one gallery room dedicated to four of Ruscha’s pop-art inflected paintings. The words Anchovy, Wow, Evil and Carp are modestly framed conceptual pieces. They’re sly paintings, antecedents to Gary Larson’s subversive comic strips (see the one in which the word “cat fud” is key to the joke).
Both Anchovy and Carp subtly suggest the titular fish without offering the viewer a direct visual reference. Instead, both words are spelled out in watery letters that bubble, spill and splash in motion across the canvas. We read “anchovy,” and pause to parse what the word-image suggests, before suddenly grasping the disconnect between a stylized word and the absent image it’s there to represent.
Mathematicians will be rewarded by the work of Xylor Jane. Like her cohorts in the gallery, Jane is hyperfocused on a single theme. In her case, it’s patterns of repeating numbers. Nichols told me that all of her paintings are investigations of long numbers and summations. “Her obsession is really about the inherent beauty in numbers, and specifically, she really has a love for very long prime numbers,” said Nichols.
Paintings such as Replay and Cypher in the Snow are essentially ecstatic yet precisely drawn rows and columns of commingling digits. Jane’s color palette is psychedelic but lands on the more muted end of that spectrum. Stamped on the front of an acid tab, her paintings would provide trip takers with something to ponder on their long navel-gazing journeys.
Acting as an indirect rebuke of our digital-is-best AI era, Nichols’ eyes light up when we enter a room full of “mail art.” Over the last 30 years, he’s collected all of the work on display. More than a hundred artists have sent him these drawings, sketches and envelope-sized paintings.
“This is all work that I get in a very private moment of opening my mail,” Nichols said. “It’s like stepping into a party with all these people who have shared what they do and make and how they think with me in this really beautiful way.” Nichols also sends “a ridiculous amount” of art to friends and to people he’s never met.
Nichols’ own contribution to In Other Words is a highly-detailed yet abstract rendering of San Rafael’s city grid. On one level, it’s simply a walking map of the town Nichols has come to love. But embedded within the overlapping pathways, there’s a retelling of the angel Raphael’s story. ”It’s about an angel who goes into disguise and helps people in various ways to deal with incredible hardships in their lives,” he explained.
The artist painted the mural directly onto one of the gallery walls. After the exhibit closes, someone will pick up a paintbrush to erase it. With a certain amount of incredulity, I asked Nichols if he was OK with that. He replied nonchalantly, “Yeah,” before adding, “I make so much work that the notion of things being lost to time doesn’t really bother me very much. There’s something beautiful about it being short-lived. It’s sad when they get painted over, but that’s the temporary nature of all of this stuff.”
‘In Other Words’ is at Marin Museum of Contemporary Art through Dec. 20. 1210 5th Ave., San Rafael; marinmoca.org.
