Nicholas Zirk

The objects we keep tell the stories of who we are. This sentiment is the guiding principle behind my still life paintings. I consider my works as a form of portraiture. Initially, I was using objects to tell stories of the young, economically marginalized, and dispossessed. My early still lifes depicted escapism and vice, through cheap indulgences such as cigarette butts, beer cans, and fast food detritus strewn about the picture plane. I distort the image within my paintings by flattening and compressing space, and by including multiple perspective points within a single image. Both of these painterly strategies relate to our contemporary methods of communicating online. Social media necessarily flattens and compresses our ability to express ourselves, by decontextualizing and limiting the ways we can speak, and presenting a dizzying array of conflicting speech simultaneously. By flattening and compressing space within the picture plane, my paintings implicitly suggest this current mode of expression. Through the use of differing viewpoints and individual light sources, the objects in my paintings express the multiplicity of viewpoints and the experience through which we understand reality. Moreover, by individualizing each object within the work, and removing it from the whole of the painting, it imbues them with a subjectivity, where, as much as the tableaux can be read as a ‘portrait’ , I also see it as a stage where the objects become actors and perform.

Nicholas Zirk was born in Vancouver, Canada. He holds a BFA from OCAD University in Toronto. He has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions across Canada, and in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. He has received artist grants from the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts.

nicholaszirk.com/work