Nigel Grimmer
Biography
A multi-media artist working primarily with photography, Nigel Grimmer’s projects are united by ongoing research exploring issues of identity and representation, specifically the changing relationship between images created for public and personal consumption. This investigation has focused on the language of the family album and more recently the self-portraits employed within social media.
Grimmer works with his family and friends to create various typologies, with each sitter often performing the same action in order create a consistent series of works. There is no implied hierarchy in the images; the model is always depicted alone in order to allow anyone to participate in the projects.
Grimmer’s practice developed from a desire to protect rather than to expose or exploit the model and from a need to create a photographic practice that was social in nature; everyone appears with some kind of mask or barrier between them and the viewer. His photographic practice predates yet mirrors the development of internet selfie memes.
His 'Art Drag Album' works seek to represent the social media “catfish” who adopts a false identity, particularly to pursue deceptive on-line romances. A series of vintage prints from the 1960s are recycled to create new portraits, where the age and gender of the protagonist is disguised.
Within the project he also experiments with the introduction of a secondary picture plane within the photographic frame; the kitsch vintage portraits are used to create ‘windows’ within the frame causing slippage between the illusionary foreground and background of the photograph highlighting the flatness, and thus the artificiality, of the photographic object.
Much of the history of photography is based on a male quest for an exotic other, and these kitsch portraits of strangely hued women reference this ‘otherness’. However, Grimmer transforms these exotic beauties into something jarringly common - now they walk the street in sportswear or pyjamas. His photographs often produce a social interaction rather than simply recording one, whether this is with family members or strangers. The photograph acts as a memento of this event, as would a traditional snapshot, but by adopting the form of a typology or meme the pressures historically associated with domestic portraiture are removed.
In 2016 Nigel’s recent photographic works appeared in Ain’t Bad magazine in the US and he was one of the winners of Uncertain States photography journal’s survey exhibition of contemporary photographic talent in the UK. He has also been awarded photography prizes selected by Natasha Egan, Director of The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Todd Lippy Director of Esopus magazine, Mark Rappolt, Editor of Art Review magazine and art critic Matthew Collings.
Nigel is currently working on the first publication of his work, Anti-Portrait.