Nichols’ first solo exhibition benefits from his broad sense of humor and his knack for detecting the aesthetic amidst the absurd. He constructs objects in nearly every media, and “Brink” includes screen-printing, stenciling, wood, felt, pompoms, wall clocks and faux fur. This array of materials could look like a booze-fueled late-night raid on the craft supply store, but Nichols’s acute awareness of artistic intention and a child-like experience of shape and color integrate the disparate work. “The Plutonic Bubonic Family” of bright felt cutouts is immediately identifiable as the Pac-Man ghosts’ long-lost relatives, but Nichols pushes past simple nostalgic recognition with an eye for detail, in this case the creation of an elaborate ghost genealogy represented formally in drawings on the backside of the cutouts. Most of the work in the exhibition was designed to fit the space, and long, stenciled “Mentalscapes” fall from ceiling to floor in a kind of graphite cascade. That the stencils are all one word, “Siberia,” emphasizes the negative, white space of the compositions and hardens their elegant appeal. Clocks that don’t tell time and sculptural triple “X”s hint at a more sordid and disconsolate Nichols who takes all of this play seriously. (Rachel Furnari)
Through February 22 at Thrones Gallery, 123 N. Jefferson St., unit 3R
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