Nic Vincent's mixed-use artworks create a tension between abstraction and representation with countless intriguing results. Many of his creations place simple identifiable icons in much larger areas of rumpled, torn, dripping and shredded materials. These larger and more violent surfaces serve alternately as foreground and background, and in some cases seem to run or drip over the small iconic images. In the tensions between his simple icons and expansive abstract surfaces, Vincent stages our impulse to create something meaningful and recognizable where there is only strangeness and disorder. In this light his miniature symbols – dwarfed by the abstract regions surrounding them – represent our desire to impose rationality and order on something much bigger than us that is governed by randomness.
However, our unwillingness to commit wholeheartedly to these meanings – or any others – is precisely what makes Vincent's work so interesting and intelligent. Showing that our habit of rationalizing the world is at once instinctual and futile, Vincent engages and cultivates that habit all the same
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