A few years back when I visited Nehemiah Cisneros at his UCLA MFA Studio in Culver City, he was in the midst of his Wicked City series but thinking more broadly about his interests. “My favorite visual stimuli are from various subcultures and fandoms,” he told me, hinting at a series of works that would directly and indirectly address his love of “nerd-core.” What he was thinking about was how to paint the idea of escapism, both literally and figuratively, but even more pertinent to Nehemiah, how to take these subcultures back into art history.
This desire was personal. Nehemiah is a collector, both physically and in imagery. His paintings are drenched in gamer speak, urban iconography, art historical references, underground comic aesthetics, but with the deft hand of a modernist. His new show, COLLECTIONS, on now at GR gallery in Tribeca, feels like a personal journey through his own curiosity and pleasure found in Reddit and Deviant Art forums, about visualizing what it means to be inspired by Internet memes and digital-derived fantasy. Cisneros found himself painting not only for a desire to contextualize his interests in art history with the hypermodernity of chat rooms and comics, but an expression of what he calls “safe spaces, I turn to when reality presents challenges. The para-social relationships formed with fictional characters and their creators serve as an imaginary best friend that aids in coping with trauma.”
Assembled and organized in the vein of the German wunderkammer of the 16th century, this is Cisneros looking most inward, a body of work that presents as his most natural and personal to date. Where he was once focused on the way his body moved through a place, he is now exploring how his desires and imagination move through his soul. —Evan Pricco
