August 2 - September 21, 2024
108|Contemporary is excited to exhibit Natural Rhythms: Hayley Nichols & Nic Annette Miller, August 2 – September 21, 2024. Opening Friday, August 2, 2024 from 6:00 – 9:00 pm, Natural Rhythms invites you to explore the patterns and movements that shape our natural and built environments. Featuring printmaking, papermaking, sculpture, and sound works by Tulsa-based artists Hayley Nichols and Nic Annette Miller, this exhibition highlights creatures of habit. Both artists look deeply at their surroundings and contemplate how shifting the way we pay attention can add perspective.
Miller’s work focuses on intricate patterns and habits found in nature, often interwoven with personal narratives of heritage, land, and food. Her installations reflect a connection to the environment, which include elements like the flight formations of birds, the migrations of butterflies, delicate pieces of fish, and the hum of bee colonies. By using wood in various stages of her mixed media process, she emphasizes nature as a continuous source of learning and understanding, bridging the interconnectedness between natural patterns and human experiences.
Nichols is drawn to unnoticed and often unintentional marks left by human interactions: the slow wear of a “push” sign on a door, the deterioration of a receipt tray, the shape of a used napkin. These commonplace objects and ephemera capture traces of shared human experience, emphasizing the intimate behaviors that shape collective participation over time. Her practice offers a playful consideration of the beauty and significance found in the ordinary rhythms of life.
Having lived and worked together for nearly a decade, Nichols and Miller continue to collaborate today under the moniker HayNicMil.
Nic Annette Miller is an interdisciplinary printmaker, designer, and teaching artist using multiple mediums to explore multicultural identities and connection to nature. For over a decade Miller’s visual art practice has been based in drawing, woodcut printmaking, watercolor, sculpture, public installations, photography, and video. Her body of work relies on public installations and community engagement and the use of the natural world with materials to bridge a connection to the environment. Additionally, she teaches public art workshops on printmaking and drawing.
Hayley Nichols is an interdisciplinary artist and designer, who recently relocated back to Tulsa, Oklahoma after a 10 year stint in New York. Her art practice experiments with ways of performing careful attention, studying the marks, movements and sounds created by our daily rituals. Through drawing, photography, conceptual intervention, sound, and movement, she facilitates a more subtle noticing of the world. This manifests in a preoccupation with the unintended, such as traces left by unconscious social gestures, slow wear on objects as we use them, the muscle memory of mundane habits.
Artist Talks:
- Thursday, August 8 at 6:00 pm in English with ASL Interpreters
- Thursday, August 29 at 6:00 pm in ASL only
This project was supported in part by the Oklahoma Arts Council, which receives support from the State of Oklahoma and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Watch the exhibition virtual tour below:
Read more about this exhibition in Independent Review Crew’s Article by Cassidy Petrazzi here