“It ends with love, exchange, fellowship. It ends as it begins, in motion, in between various modes of being and belonging, and on the way to new economies of giving, taking being with and for and it ends with a ride in a Buick Skylark on the way to another place altogether. Surprising, perhaps, after we have engaged dispossession, debt, dislocation and violence. But not surprising when you have understood that the projects of “fugitive planning and black study” are mostly about reaching out to find connection; they are about making common cause with the brokenness of being, a brokenness, I would venture to say, that is also blackness, that remains blackness, and will, despite all, remain broken because this book is not a prescription for repair.” – Jack Halberstam in The Undercommons
Tech Nix (he/they) is an interdisciplinary artist born in Chicago, Illinois and now based in New York City. Their work explores identity, interpersonal relationships, haptic care, home, the self, and the body. Informed by authors like Fred Moten, Jack Halberstam, and Christina Sharpe, Tech is interested in imagining worlds in between and outside of institutions, and what bodies that occupy those spaces can look and feel like.
Nix is currently in their last year at New York University, pursing two degrees in Studio Art and Art History. They have broad experience across multiple areas of the art world, such as Art Direction and Production Design in film, Curation and Curatorial Research, and Studio Management. Currently, they are assisting the artist Linda Sormin in her explorations of her Indonesian heritage through drawing and textile.
My interdisciplinary practice explores identity, interpersonal relationships, haptic care, home, the self, and the body. Through reclaiming and reshaping flesh, I examine the condition of Black, queer, and trans bodies in civil society–how we grieve, how we labor, how we live, how we love. Using the language of authors like Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, and Christina Sharpe, I am attempting to carve out space–in institutions, academia, places built on the backs of but not for people like me–and occupy them not in opposition but in subversion. I am unable to escape the institution or the world writ large, but I find refuge in its basements, its dance floors, its house parties; the community found in the cut. I am always in motion, between and beyond establishments, and my work maintains the continuous project of Undercommons living and loving within by remaining elusive, slippery, “in but not of”.
Rather than being confined by limitations of one medium, I utilize multiple techniques, materials, and ways of making to build worlds, harnessing the senses to immerse viewers into the spaces I am making and unmaking. My work straddles the line between that which is grotesque and that which is tender, a line I walk everyday in the world. I am uninterested in preciousness; my work is meant to urge you beyond the boundary and feel something you may not want to. To touch that which is gnarled and mangled, to see (feel) the nature of being in a world that does not want you to be. I see my work as a process of interrogation–of ‘study’, as Moten and Harney might call it–and one that is not only never-ending, but necessarily communal. My work aims to dismantle the ‘white cube’ and encourage interaction and speculation, and requires others to engage; to feel with others, to be with others, to rub against others. It is an earnest investigation into Black and queer past, present, and future, and always hopes for those who enter to never really exit–to always be escaping, evading, and emerging.
-TN
Tech Nix 