Nick Hobbs

These drawings are snapshots (fragments, evidence) of an attempt to reconcile two scales. First, the scale of the everyday, the earthly, the personal, and the human. That which is familiar and specific to personal experience, especially those qualities that are most taken for granted. Second, the scale of deep time and the cosmological. That which exists, all or in part, beyond the boundaries of intuition. I understand these scales to be irreconcilable, making this practice ultimately futile from the perspective of arriving at a definite conclusion. Instead, I approach it as an archaeologist, inferring what I can from the in-situ artifacts of culture, experience, memory, intimacy, and history. This fossil record is incomplete and often misleading, but a great deal of knowledge can be extrapolated from such sparse evidence.

My drawing process begins with photographs foraged from scientific archives, the personal archive of my own photographs, and from the cultural archive of the internet. Images from these varied sources are interwoven in an alchemic dance of familiarity and ambiguity to question the possibility of knowing at a distance. I want to glimpse what lies just beyond the barrier between air and void. Between you and me. Between inside and outside. My drawings are quiet windows into the overwhelming cosmological context. They are probes ill equipped for what they hope to find. They are touch and sight and time—the stuff of consciousness. Crystallized in carbon—the stuff of life. That is all they will ever be. 

Biography

Nick Hobbs received his BFA from Louisiana Tech University and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas. In 2018, he attended a formative residency program at the New York Academy of Art, cementing his roots in the academic tradition of drawing. Hiis work has been published in several publications nationally and internationally. He has been hosted as a visiting artist and taught workshops at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, and his work can be found in the permanent collection of McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He has been involved in amateur astronomy his entire life, and it influences everything he does.