When you walk into a gallery for an exhibition of fine arts, you probably don’t expect to be greeted by welded steel and brutalist robot costumes.
But that’s exactly what you’ll get with the work of Norman-based artist and arts educator Nick Lillard.
As a longtime manipulator of metal materials, often focusing on shaped, thin pencil rod steel to create complex line work figures and impressionist forms, Lillard has become a mainstay of the Norman and OKC arts scenes as a regular contributor and collaborator in outsider art collectives, a sometime creator of large-scale public artworks, and as an arts teacher everywhere from OU to Norman’s Firehouse Art Center.
But as part of the new “Sculpted Worlds” exhibition, opening at Norman’s Uncanny Art House this Friday, June 12th, Lillard’s work is taking its place among other surrealist sculptures and mind-bending modeled figures, with his massive metal caterpillars taking up residence in the gallery’s display windows and his bent steel robot costumes silently surveying the space.
For Lillard, each piece is not just an attempt at conveying those forms, but also of displaying his own physical manipulation of the material, and his own personal fascination with the steel.
Nick Lillard: Usually, it's “I'm going to build it with my hands” is the answer in some way, and whether it's found object or brand new material, it always has to look heavily influenced by my own efforts.
I did have a fascination with it, because it can kind of be a message in a bottle to the future, you know, time capsule, because it lasts longer, right? So you can have a three-dimensional sculpture out of steel that will last x period of time, especially if it's treated well.
Brett Fieldcamp: Many of Lillard’s pieces in the show have already stood the test of time, and many are carrying with them the stories of previous lives as performance props, public artworks, and even some moveable, wearable metal costumes.
Nick Lillard: This show is kind of the history of how I got to be where I'm at.
These pieces are pieces that I mulled over many, many times.
And you know, there's two “performance suits” I call them. They're made out of steel, but they were characters, and I would perform in them, and now they're just statues. We just welded them where they're all one piece now, and they're now sculpture, but their history comes along with the content, and that's part of the fun.
Brett Fieldcamp: Of course, it takes a lot of new work, new effort, and new creative problem-solving to display pieces as large as Lillard’s shaped-steel robots or collaborator Chris McDaniel’s towering robotic figure built from reclaimed plastic.
So while Lillard says there are no newly created artworks on display, he did build something new and massive for this show.
Nick Lillard: There's no new art pieces in this show, and we were very intentional for me not to do that, but to showcase and upgrade everything that I've been doing.
But funny enough, the real new sculpture is the one that holds up Chris's piece and holds up “Overbot.”
It's that giant 11-foot hanger that's right in the middle of the area, which probably people won't even think about, but yet it was probably my greatest success for the entire show, is the thing nobody will think about.
Brett Fieldcamp: That kind of practical potential for Lillard’s metalworking tools and know-how are more than just a happy byproduct. He feels that it’s part of the accessible appeal of the work, and can also be a helpful addition to life outside of the arts world.
Nick Lillard: I love things that are blue collar and relating that blue collar aesthetic of welding to something that is considered high art.
I have projects that are blue collar. They sometimes help afford my life while I create these monsters that are over to the side.
Brett Fieldcamp: But those monsters aren’t just for showing off his steel-working skills or his eye for linework, negative spaces, or cleverly hidden lighting elements. It’s all meant to come together and to make something manufactured feel real, organic, and sometimes even human.
Nick Lillard: There are so many ways to succeed as an artist where the path has already been laid before you, right?
But how is it that you can shake things up and create your own unique path? How is it that I'm going to be able to convey this unique experience that is me, and transmit some of that into these materials, and have somebody else somehow understand that?
I like to add a little bit of lighting, a little bit of movement. Usually it's very limited, but just enough to kind of make it feel like it's alive.
Brett Fieldcamp: The exhibition “Sculpted Worlds,” featuring works by Nick Lillard, as well as Chris McDaniel, Jennifer Burwell, Ken Hall, and Claire Holloway, opens this Friday, June 12th at Uncanny Art House in Norman.
For more, visit uncannyarthouse.com and follow @nicklillardart on Instagram.
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