nicole killian’s between a book and a soft place, on view April 21–July 16, 2023, is a vivacious learning environment inspired by conversation pits and the Italian radical design movement. In this play-space for language, visitors are invited to consider the different ways language may be carried, embodied, and perhaps “queered”: we wear the language, we dance the language with our bodies, and we hold the language in our hands.
This new commission is a study for killian’s ongoing research questions around queering design education. “How can we understand designers as bodies in space, with agency, instead of simply ‘creatives’? And how can we understand bodies of text as living things that produce difficult conversations, instead of simply ‘content’?” The public is invited to live in and respond to these questions, leaving traces of their presence over time.
nicole killian, between a book and a soft place, 2023, in collaboration with HH Hiaasen, Matt Pockett, and Jen Ansley. (artwork @ nicole killian, photograph by David Hale)
nicole killian’s between a book and a soft place, on view April 21–July 16, 2023, is a vivacious learning environment inspired by conversation pits and the Italian radical design movement. In this play-space for language, visitors are invited to consider the different ways language may be carried, embodied, and perhaps “queered”: we wear the language, we dance the language with our bodies, and we hold the language in our hands.
This new commission is a study for killian’s ongoing research questions around queering design education. “How can we understand designers as bodies in space, with agency, instead of simply ‘creatives’? And how can we understand bodies of text as living things that produce difficult conversations, instead of simply ‘content’?” The public is invited to live in and respond to these questions, leaving traces of their presence over time.
nicole killian, between a book and a soft place, 2023, in collaboration with HH Hiaasen, Matt Pockett, and Jen Ansley. (artwork @ nicole killian, photograph by David Hale)
nicole killian
They are a designer, artist, and educator based in Richmond, VA. killian’s practice oscillates between digital and analog modes for testing publishing projects. Their work has been exhibited at Sediment in Richmond, CAVE in Detroit, Arcadia Missa in London, Present Works in Milwaukee, Little Berlin in Philadelphia, Embassy in Los Angeles, Sadie Halie Projects in Brooklyn, Nomade Gallery in Hangzhou, and Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art for Lorna Mills’s Ways of Something. killian’s expanded approach to publishing considers objects as containers for language—language that gets activated when read, passed, held, and handled.
nicole killian
They are a designer, artist, and educator based in Richmond, VA. killian’s practice oscillates between digital and analog modes for testing publishing projects. Their work has been exhibited at Sediment in Richmond, CAVE in Detroit, Arcadia Missa in London, Present Works in Milwaukee, Little Berlin in Philadelphia, Embassy in Los Angeles, Sadie Halie Projects in Brooklyn, Nomade Gallery in Hangzhou, and Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art for Lorna Mills’s Ways of Something. killian’s expanded approach to publishing considers objects as containers for language—language that gets activated when read, passed, held, and handled.