Nate Lewis Nate Lewis
(b. Pittsburgh, PA 1985)
Lives and works between Washington DC and New York, NY
Axe, 2018, hand sculpted paper inkjet print, India ink
Collection of Dr. Robert B. Feldman
Nate Lewis has developed a process of creating paper sculptures that expand the materiality of paper, collage, and mark making through rigorous cutting, scraping, additive, and subtractive, physical treatment of his tactile materials. Through combining elements of drawing, portrait photography, etching, cutting, and embroidery, his large-scale, intricately executed paper human figures are further informed and thus seemingly animated by the artist’s experience as a professional critical care nurse, who made his first works using a scalpel knife on EKG paper. Lewis’s treatment of paper, pulp, photography, collage, patterning, mark making, and staining is as human as a breathing organism. As he sculpts patterns, cross hatches cuts, and stains with pours and ink bleeds, a three-dimensional effect is communicated along accurate anatomical structures, cellular tissues, and bodily movements—both internal and external—rendering a gorgeous, tactile, and juicy surface that celebrates the body’s strength, movement, and agility while considering its fragility beautifully through a dancer’s body and phenomenal gesture. The marked and patterned body, Axe, is muscular and masculine while simultaneously referencing another worldly surface, somewhat foreign, somehow exotic, and other, an alienated body, alternatively dancing in isolation, in trance, yet larger than life in a full circular sinuous motion that is empowering. Informed by the experience of caring for the human body, strangers’ bodies in all states from healing to demise, infuses the work with a heightened sense of empathy and respect for the black body, the black male body.