Exhibition by: Nike Romano - The fifth in a series of art exhibitions by recent Michaelis Master of Fine Arts Graduates.

As part of an ongoing series of solo shows by recent Masters of Fine Art Graduates, the Michaelis Galleries are delighted to host the exhibition Evidence of Things Unseen, by Nike Romano. The exhibition will be running from the 26th February 2014 to the 12 March 2014. Please join us on Wednesday 26th February 2014 for the opening at 18:00, and Tuesday 4 March 2014 from 13:00 – 14:00 for a walkabout with the artist.

Nike Romano seeks to make visible parts of her lived experience that up until now have felt un-representable. To this end, she looks to early childhood as a way of exploring a time when experience and memory co-existed before language. Romano explores this fluid space with a view to generating and incubating ideas of compassion, co-emergence and becoming.

Romano’s working process is characterised by a playful engagement with materials in the studio. She utilises everyday materials associated with women’s craftwork and children’s play that are often undervalued. Concerned with redeeming these materials as worthy in their own right, the artist also claims agency for herself through her encounter with them.

“At times I am a nine-year-old, involved in craft work. At other times I am a pre-verbal infant exploring felt experience. I am also a mother, juggling my practices between caring for my children, maintaining my home and engaging in making in the studio.”

Concerned with the tension between the visible and the invisible, of being seen and unseen, Romano employs the metaphor of the colour spectrum, as a continuum in which the naked eye sees only a small part of a more expansive whole. This enquiry is further manifest in her engagement with the sub-atomic world and the macro scale of the cosmic universe in her subject matter.

In her paintings, the artist seeks to dismantle binaries of public/private, either/or, and inclusion/exclusion, by exploring spaces that accommodate notions of multiplicity, plurality and a non-hierarchical worldview.

Nike Romano completed her PG Dip in Fine Arts at Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2009. In 2010 she had her first solo show entitled sum of the parts, at the Association of Arts in Cape Town. She completed her Masters in Fine Art in May 2013. Romano is currently employed as a lecturer in History of Art and Design at Cape Peninsula University of Technology.