'Artist Woman': Nicole Storm

‘Artist Woman’ is a solo exhibition and installation by Oakland based artist Nicole Storm.

Storm truly makes her work in movement, ‘taking notes’ as she calls it, on things all around the studio, from the vantage of the floor, a chair, while walking around, hidden behind a piece of furniture, on her way to somewhere else. She involves previous works in new ones, tracing their outlines onto works in progress, as well as the shapes of the bodies of people around her, asking people to place their heads on her paper for a moment. ‘Artist Woman’ includes works on paper in a traditional format, as well as ephemera from her time in residence at Studio Route 29: coffee cups and napkins that she worked onto, pages from a calendar she had been working on and carrying with her since 2022, and ephemera from her home studio in California (a much folded and marked US Senate Certificate of Recognition for Creative Growth, the text now rendered unreadable, and a printed questionnaire with questions like: “what autonomous CHOICES did the artist make today?”). Her practice of extending her painting through time and space brings up, yes, exciting new ways of thinking about ‘Painting in the 21st Century’ - namely, why not dance around with it, paint into your calendar, start on a canvas and finish on a napkin, ask a friend to perform some lines while you trace their shape, sip your tea and then make some notes on the cup? Watching Storm work brings us a refreshing sense of permissiveness - she really makes the medium work for her.

What do they look like? Often, quite bright! In keeping with her overflowing process, she tends towards radiant colors. We think her mark making feels as though it has emerged as lichen or moss - she overlaps her marks over time to build up a field on her surfaces, a bloom that feels decentralized and abstract, though we know it refers to specific shapes and narratives given us through her notes and tracings (appearing as dense hatched zones and long looping lines). In installation, she makes further notes on the walls around the drawings, as well as numbering each piece to a system precise to her but unavailable to us. Overall, there is a sense of ebullience, of surety, and things held loosely in connection.

The inclusion of documents which connect her specific practice to a system (the Progressive Studio she works in and the complicated systems it works within, and by implication disability related systems she personally must interface with), feels important - it links her joyous dance to a structure in a way that feels so accurate to how our lives are lived in this place: radiant, uncontained movement always also set within structures that define and seek to settle, sometimes to commend and resource, and sometimes to restrict and control.