Nick Conbere: Using Drawing to Visualize Changing Landscapes

This ECPN exposure is an invitation to be in dialogue with Nick Conbere’s work. In his artistic practice, Nick Conbere explores ways to use landscape, seen through the lens of personal experience and narrative, to visualize intertwining relationships of the natural and human worlds.

Using drawing, printmaking and related digital techniques, he juxtaposes and layers imagery to encourage connections among disparate ideas and to evoke a sense of memory and history. Each artwork is based on many on-site sketches which are later developed in a studio setting. Researching ecological and cultural histories of a place strengthens the visual documentation.

His projects range in subject matter, from invented landscapes based on observations of scenic tourist sites to a collaborative, interdisciplinary project reflecting on the effects of dams on the Columbia River. He aims to create artwork in which real-world imagery and information resonate metaphorically, creating a space for the imagination.