Caleb Nussear

Statement

Caleb Nussear is an American artist living in New York City. He has had recent exhibitions of his drawings and installations at WORK Gallery in Brooklyn, Vaudeville Park in Brooklyn, and Local Project in Long Island City. Recent shows include an exhibition of his Iceland Drawings February 2012 at The Barclay, Philadelphia, and a collaboration with the Hayden Planetarium in New York City presenting sculptures inspired by the USGS LANDSAT earth survey satellites. He received degrees from Bard College at Simon’s Rock and University of Chicago. Mr. Nussear’s work is based upon interactions between the natural landscape, formal gestural abstraction, and certain geometric figures. He uses satellite imagery, mathematics, and personal photography as source material in his compositions.

Artworks

This panel depicts my rendering of a {3,4,3} in silverpoint and graphite pencil. My idea was to suggest several of the 3d polyhedral cross-sections possible in this polytope simultaneously here. Silverpoint drawing is a renaissance technique where a silver stylus is rubbed gently against a traditionally gessoed panel, gradually building up darker values via repetition. The medium is very sensitive to gradations of value, and is absolutely luminous in person, although notoriously difficult to photograph accurately. The darker values of the drawing are actually reflective when viewed at an angle, much like a silver backed mirror.

This sculpture is a slightly modified Hauy construction of the rhombic dodecahedron, a form which I find very compelling. Alternating units in each level of the stellation are absent, causing the sculpture to also resemble a rhombic dodecahedral honeycomb. It is fabricated out of sawn and sanded acrylic sheet, and is translucent in appearance. Certain polyhedra are critical within my artistic sense of harmony, and the rhombic dodecahedron is one of these. This sculpture is handmade, and the small imperfections of the fabrication process distinguish it as a unique artwork.