Alex H Nichols
Alex H. Nichols is a writer and multimedia artist based between San Francisco and Los Angeles, working at the intersection of writing, performance, video, photography, painting, and installation. Her work challenges the boundaries that separate our internal and external narratives. She has exhibited her work and performed her writing locally and internationally at renowned institutions such as the 18th Street Art Center in Los Angeles, Headlands Center for the Arts, Djerassi, Bamboo Curtain Studios in Taipei, SF Recology, Minnesota Street Projects, MOCA Taipei, ZONA MACO Art Fair in Mexico City, MACO Museum of Contemporary Art in Oaxaca, and Art Miami. She is currently represented by MODERNISM Gallery in San Francisco.
Follow Alex’s work on Instagram: @alexhnichols and websites: alexandmushi.com, thinkmaketank.org and alexhnichols.com
We first met multimedia artist Alex H Nichols in 2019 as co-participants in a pop-up exhibition in San Francisco, and it’s been inspiring to follow her practice spanning performance, painting, photography, videography, installation and writing, ever since. We were overjoyed when Alex bought an Elio Lamp for her stunning San Francisco home and studio. And just a few months ago, when she told us she was moving to LA, she shared how she moved herself—just her truck, picking her most special things to move with her. Among them was the Elio Lamp, and it was the highest compliment we could receive.
We spent a day with Alex in her effortlessly cool Venice live-work space—a converted mechanic shop—for an interview that offers a window into her worlds. Alex discusses the core of her multi-media art practice, the rules she builds to work within, and about working with both hard and soft edges.
Utharaa: Tell us about your art practice—how would you describe your work? Do you see it as your art, your work, or both?
Alex: Questions drive my work. Playfulness, a willingness to take risks, observation and to be constantly curious, drive me. Every project I make has rules and parameters that give a structure to explore within.
I write three hours a day. It starts with my journal. Then it moves to my novel. I start with questions. What do I hear? What do I see? What do I feel? There are also technical questions that train my understanding of my material. When I write: What can short sentences do? what can long sentences do? When I paint I ask: How does a heavy fast line feel next to a rigid line or a cut line?
Core to all my work is the knowledge that an idea must be experienced to become one's own. A material must be experienced to become one's own. Pick up the camera and shoot, draw with charcoal, watch the black dust blow over the paper. If I need to understand a body moving in space, I must move my body in space. If I am to understand the dark blue of my childhood, I mix ultramarine blue, burnt umber, and Mars black. The discipline and mastery of material mean hands-on—learning their capacities. How have they been used in the past? Try this. Feel this. Observe this.
Ultimately, when I work, I want to hit my canvas with paint and brush like a heartbeat—something so natural and intrinsic that I can bypass thought and move completely from a space of energy, life force, and intuition.
Utharaa: You’ve recently moved to Los Angeles—how would you describe your new home? What do you love most about living here?
Alex: I live in Venice Beach in a converted mechanic shop with a giant roll-up corrugated door. At night, my space drops to 50 degrees—reminding me that LA is a desert. Warm days, cold nights. My space, because of the uninsulated corrugated metal, is like skin; it becomes the temperature of the outside.
What do I notice most about LA? The industry that dominates LA is film—everything to do with film, photography, set design, lighting, etc.—so when I strike up a conversation in a café, it often turns to language, moving image, or character. A city's primary industries impact the texture of conversations. I remember when I lived in DC, I felt the arms of the government dominating the inside of every conversation.
I arrived in Los Angeles just two months before the fires. I watched the first hills catch fire as I looked down Venice Way toward Palisades. I saw the giant flame and a chimney of smoke. I felt the dry winds hit my skin. The next day, thousands of acres and homes were gone. Los Angeles is dry. It exists in a terrain that is beautiful and volatile, and the city itself is this—something that can seem so calm, a blue sky with palm trees on long, spindly trunks that can self-destruct as easily as it builds.
Each neighborhood has its own character, and that is palpable. It’s vast. The distances are big: K-Town to Venice Beach to Echo Park. I love to walk and drive the side streets instead of the highways. I call it learning the thin veins of the city.
Utharaa: You work across different mediums—do they represent different themes or ideas, or is there a common thread that connects them?
Alex: My themes are constant, the core questions: What are the illusions that shroud our sense of self, the narratives we construct, and the deceptions we willingly embrace? I love to deconstruct— to take things apart and understand how things work. I do that in every medium I work in.
Every material has its distinct characteristics. Writing is words and sentences with rules around verb order, grammar, rhythm, tone, and voice. Performance is my body moving like a dance— my body becomes language. Painting is paint, ink, charcoal, and glue on a surface.
I work in different disciplines because they each explore a different aspect of a question. In my PINKBOX installation and performance, I am a woman inside an aluminum box— a box just slightly bigger than myself, suspended ten feet off the ground in a cluster of redwood trees. It is a box swinging in the forest, and a woman inside that box trying to perform. The box becomes the metaphor for societal constraints and structures. The question becomes literal: How can this woman move within the constraints of the box she is inside of? In my novel, the constraints are built through the story of a married woman who struggles with her roles as a mother and artist. It becomes a story, but the story is the same as the PINKBOX— how does a woman move when she is constrained by the box of cultural and social prescriptions?
I use these mediums to push each other.
Utharaa: Do you think about ‘softness’ at all? Does it show up in your work, your home, your relationships, or how you engage with the world?
Alex: Softness. First, I think of approaching softly, like a whisper. A whisper so quiet that I lean into the person speaking. A touch so soft that my body moves toward it. I think of soft light. What does soft light create? Soft edges. Soft is flexible. In my paintings, the soft line and the hard line are always there to balance each other. The line made by my hand has a softness; it pulses. The line made by scissors, when I cut paper and place it into the canvas, gives a sharp, hard line. Softness is compassion. What would softness in writing be? Would a short sentence be considered hard? A long, meandering sentence soft? I like to take the word "softness," thinking it through as a given parameter, and applying it to the materials I work with. A masterful straight line in Chinese calligraphy must be a line that can bend but not break, like a branch of a tree. It must be soft but not so soft that it loses form or sags without intention. Softness has intention, has form, has force. Softness asks me to become more alert. To lean in. Something must be able to bend and not break.
