Nathan Huff

Solo Exhibition, Sullivan Goss Gallery in Santa Barbara

I often make art as an act of hope. I make it as an invitation for something wondrous to occur and as an explorer who is reaching for something just beyond my experience. I love using the symbol of boats to invite the viewer to imagine moving horizontally, and ladders offer a vertical direction. The intersections between these differing invitations offer a rich and generative space for my practice.

Nature has much to reveal to us. What might happen if we found wonder in the particular trees of our native landscapes? What might happen if we looked for pockets of symbiosis and generative relationships between our relationship to the land and our relationships to one another? As I’ve spent time in the landscape through this season discovering the surprise delight of light and texture, I’ve found that these trees can offer a web of interconnected knowledge, responsibility, and awe.

Installation at the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art

mixed media, 2021

It is no surprise that in our fast-paced culture, we often miss one another; our attempts at knowing and being known are halted or even derailed. In an age of soundbites and ideological echo chambers, I explore the complicated and imperfect ways that we might reach across divides. Where are the ruptures, the moments of curious enthusiasm, and human empathy that move us through the tangled and layered parts of our stories? How might our shadows, histories, and institutions erect bridges rather than barriers towards a more nuanced reception of one another? Utilizing themes of migration, elemental materials of wood and paper, perceived obstacles, and opening vistas, my installation imagines the multilayered journey in discovering one another.

Solo Exhibition: Sullivan Goss Gallery, 2021

Solo Exhibition: The Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara. 2020

The site specific installation examines ways in which we inhabit homes and move through domestic spaces based on memory and emotion. Installed in unconventional ways, paintings and site-specific installations engage with the space itself—the historic, Victorian Italianate style home designed and built in 1904 by James J. Acheson. Meandering the Edges is a visual poem for the rich and layered dynamics of home spaces and a longing stretch to those places and people who are just out of reach.

Meandering the Edges, an art installation by Nathan Huff at the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara, was scheduled to open on March, 2020. Due to Covid-19, the gallery was closed and only a handful of people visited the exhibition in person .

Sullivan Goss Gallery

July 26 - September 24, 2019

“The Stories We Tell Ourselves” is a collection of works on paper and sculptures that pair common domestic objects with incongruous spaces and archetypal symbols. Seemingly discordant moments or symbols are collided with one another to create visual conversations. These impractical even harebrained scenarios interrupt our normal reality and while they celebrate the intuitive and subconscious they also offer new awareness to the present moment.

Dreamscapes dominate this body of work. The images depicted are not meant to be a literal recounting of a night’s sleep, nor are they aspirational hopes, but rather a mining of common objects and psychologically charged narratives that we use to make sense of the world. Wooden floorboard corners of rooms, pillows, draping fabric, furniture, and boats are just a few of the banal objects that gain complexity when juxtaposed against ruptures in nature or sublime transience. In my gouache drawings and sculptures, wooden boats traverse a variety of surfaces and spaces. Drought tolerant cacti levitate and illuminate the night. Iconic mid-century modern décor provides a domestic foil for ruptures in the psyche, and repetitive stacked pillows offer a reprieve from the rational narratives that often dominate our lives. The act of interpreting these intertwined situations teeter between observing the mundane and a fantastical adventure of untangling threads of nostalgia and memory.

Solo Exhibition at George Fox University, Oregon

Memories are often perceptual and walls might be less physical than they appear. Discovering slippages between these states provides a rich and fertile arena in my art practice.

I look for narratives that seem imbedded within familiar objects and materials. A fan, baskets, lamps, pillows, sheets of typing paper, wooden floors, are the starting points for reflection within my studio. At times imagination runs wild invading and the subconscious emerges with animal cultural archetypes. Playing the partial roles of psychotherapist, part patient, part interior designer and craft person, I use drawing and sculpture to explore the facets of memory as I attempt to restructure an experience.

Solo Exhibition, New Media Gallery, Ventura College, 2017

Solo Exhibition at the Sweeney Gallery and Culver Museum, Riverside, 2013. Curator Jennifer Frias

Domesticating Disturbances suggests an entendre of situations that interrupt the comfortable notion of domesticity. Through various drawings, installations, paintings and sculptures, Huff applies the concept of domesticity with animals and everyday objects. Furthermore, he associates them together in two and three-dimensional form to create unexpected situations or events.

22”x 30” Gouache and Watercolor on Paper

2018