Nico Sun
Illustrator
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am a white rabbit. I create in chase of the elusive allusion. It's a visual sleight of hand: blink, and you'll miss it. I drew in the margins of my textbooks; now, the punchline lives in the margins of my drawings. And drawing is both a language and a tool that I use as a lens for translating the world. My visual styles belong to that which is familiar, and I project my subjective reality onto the unsentimental and the definite.
Research is critical to my work. In each piece, I place fiction in proximity with authenticity. And my process is rooted in its beginnings in cluttering my work with those fragments of reality. These might include a period-specific reference to the wallpaper, or a package from a popular product, and they exist atmospherically, like hidden clues in a puzzle.
I draw inspiration from mundane life and pop culture to express this adolescent, inchoate humor. While my meaningful research lends a heaviness to each piece, the subject and themes remain lighthearted and approachable. I want to create work that is relatable and enjoyable for everyone: to elicit a smile and a raised brow. The viewer is invited to join me on the chase, thereby adding an interactive narrative to an otherwise still image.