Strange Fire

Q&A: NIck Drain

By Zora J Murff | May 21, 2020

Nick Drain is a fine artist born in Chicago, IL, who lives and works in Milwaukee, WI. Centering his thinking around blackness, his work investigates the black identity and the politics of visibility in order to understand the complex relationship between blackness and the object of the camera. He has exhibited both locally and nationally, most notably showing work at the International Center for Photography in New York City, NY, and the Colorado Photographic Art Center in Denver, CO. Nick attended the Yale Norfolk School of Art in 2019 and received a BFA from the New Studio Practice program at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in 2020.

Zora J Murff: Hi Nick! I’m excited to speak with you here. We’ve known each other a little over a year now, right? My friend, and your professor, Jon Horvath connected us at SPE Cleveland. I remember when you opened your portfolio box, and I saw this image, One for Us. Who are you as an artist, and how does this image fit into your practice?

ND: I’m delighted to be speaking with you here as well, and such a huge appreciation for and shoutout to Jon Horvath. To describe myself most simply, I identify as a multi-disciplinary artist concerned with images and Blackness. I’m working to understand the relationship between Blackness and visibility at the site of the camera in order to contend with the ways that the photographic medium has worked — and continues to work — to perform violence upon Black people, and to flip the power dynamic of those who see by way of the white gaze and those rendered visible by their Blackness. I locate my current work and thinking at the intersection of the history of Black representation via photography, and the projected future of Black people in the context of widening utilizations of the image within contemporary AI-assisted surveillance practices.

One for Us was made for the second time in March or April of last year. I’m pretty sure you saw the first version at SPE, and we talked about my feeling that it needed to be made again. I recognize that image as a bookmark in the development of my thinking and work — it kind of closes one chapter and is foundational for the next. As seen in the other work that I showed you when we first met in Cleveland, up to the point of making One for Us, my photographic work was far more concerned with representation and my own identity as an individual than it is now. One for Us was a moment where it felt like all of the different parts of the visual language that I had been working to cultivate finally came together successfully. It was the moment where I really began to consider the camera in its own right, the tangible impacts of the white gaze, and how to position different audiences in different places with one work. That image taught me a lot.

ZJM: I visited your website this morning (it has been a while since I’ve done so). I appreciate how you’ve made your thesis preface seeing your work, and how it is presented as if by flashlight. I’d like to begin our conversation with the Ellison quote you use an epigraph:

“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” — Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man. (p. 3)

This medium is complicated. It can be used to solidify our experience while simultaneously being used as a tool to negate our existence. Why do you find it important to grapple with photography/the camera/the image/et. al. in this way?

ND:  There are so many reasons, but honestly, it feels like I just have to. We’ve entered a landscape where images are functioning in ways that they never have before — or are at least doing that work to a much higher degree. As a result of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, there are now images that are created and traded just between different machines/algorithms/computing systems — images that never cross the eye of a human being, and that both deeply fascinates and terrifies me. From my perspective, it feels like being on a runaway train that’s long been off the track. 

Eleven years ago we got the ‘HP Computers are racist’ video where the computer’s facial tracking software registers the white employee, but not her Black coworker. Just as recently as October of 2019, a study was released that revealed that algorithms used in US hospitals to assess and refer patients to programs providing more complex care were systematically discriminating against Black patients who were equally as sick as their white counterparts. These problems aren’t being fixed, but artificial intelligence technologies — many of which rely upon and make use of all kinds of images — are only becoming more and more entrenched within systems which tangibly determine the conditions of Black life. There’s plenty of other cases where things like this have taken place, and the subsequent events are often a corporate apology and calls for greater diversity in these fields, but how many Black people have to be in a room to compensate for four-hundred years of violent oppression and colonialism? 

If we take these statements at face value and accept that none of these companies or developers set out to build racist algorithms, then we’re in a situation that’s arguably worse; in which the people building these technologies still haven’t completely figured out how to build not racist algorithms. That illuminates the fact that the problems are systemic, and points to the ways that the technology of race has metaphysically impacted the ways we see. We’re experiencing a global pandemic, and all the while there are computers in hospitals that are denying Black people the care that they are truly deserving of? Like we’re legitimately living a Black Mirror episode.

ZJM: I think these parallels you present are on the money. I find it important in my own practice to possess the ability to make those connections, because the places where systems have these small breakdowns are the places where systemic intentions are revealed more clearly. Your image, Implicit Bias #2, is a good opening salvo, can you talk about it?

ND:  Implicit Bias Test #2 was made near the end of my time at Yale’s Norfolk residency last year when a large majority of the thinking and position I’m now operating from was in its earliest stages. At the time, I was hyper-focused on the camera, all of the ways that it failed, and how those failures could then be utilized productively in a different way. 

Exposure is probably the most accessible way to illuminate the ways that whiteness has long been set as the operational standard within the medium of photography and the technologies necessary to make a photograph. I remembered that I had been taught that when measuring light with an external light meter, to always take the incident measurement as opposed to the reflective whenever possible — but eventually I learned that when metering for dark skin, the reflective measurement is just as important to consider on account of the additional light absorbed by dark skin. This image was made with that in mind, and was a way for me to begin to understand how to visually discuss these complex histories connecting Blackness, photography, and visibility.

ZJM: A history you address in your writing is how Blackness is tied to surveillance, something that is prevalent in a lot of conversations today. You write, 

The camera continues to be upheld as a standard of objective witness, yet when implemented in repeated attempts to keep Black people alive, or at least hold their killers accountable, the image continues to fail. In the words of Audre Lorde: “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” 

Your photograph attempts to point at this larger idea, right? And this idea is one that we’re talking about today through individuals like Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. How have you been thinking about Blackness, photography, and visibility recently?

ND: A lot of the questions that I’m currently asking in my studio all point back to a larger question, about the value and cost of visibility in general as a Black person. I don’t assume that Black people will ever be able to completely subvert the fact we can be seen in the most corporeal sense, so the visibility that I am concerned with is situational. I find that to be Black is to be rendered, represented, and understood, in most cases, on one of two poles: invisibility and hyper-visibility. 

The photograph is implicated, as it is a tool for making things visible in a way that they are not otherwise. I posit that any figurative representation can be recognized as a tangible instantiation of a triangular relationship between the subject, the viewer, and the image-maker; a relationship in which the viewer is almost always at the top, as they, individually and en masse, determine the capabilities and power of an image. Countless times we’ve seen images — moving and still — fail in protecting Black life as they are purported to, so the goal of my work at present is to find ways to rotate that triangle to place the Black subject at the top and shift the power dynamic of those who are privileged to see by way of the white gaze, and those who are seen.

ZJM: To follow up on that, you inject yourself into the work in these complicated ways — as maker, as subject, as concept — with sincerity. Something I have been contemplating a lot lately are the ways in which I become complicit through my practice. Do you critique yourself in your work? If you do, why is it important that you include it?

ND: I grapple with this a lot. As someone who still earns a portion of my living through making images on commission, and someone who learned to make photographs in an effort to document and represent my own experiences as a Black person in pursuit of some positive effect, sometimes it feels like asking the most productive questions in my work is to simultaneously set a trap for myself and all of the photographers I looked up to in my most formative time as an image-maker. In some ways, I’m really thankful for this, but in others, it is really confounding, as I don’t yet have the luxury to engage with photography in only the ways I see fit. So I guess the best way that I can answer that question is that the work critiques me, and when it does, I listen.

ZJM: You spend a lot of time thinking, talking about and making photography, but there are other facets to your practice. I remember in that initial portfolio review, I was just as stricken by Black American Flag #3 as I was by One for Us. That was because it was working for me aesthetically both as a sculpture and a photograph. That aside, at your solo exhibition, you had one of them displayed on the floor as you walked into the space (if I’m remembering correctly). Why was it important for you to step away from image-making? How do you feel that has enhanced your artistic practice?

ND: I’d love to one day figure out why, but to me, photography and sculpture are really similar languages. I wouldn’t say that I stepped away from image-making, but rather that I stepped into sculpting. A sculpture can make certain demands of a viewer, and can implicate and encapsulate a viewer in ways that a photograph on a wall cannot. Sculptures are three-dimensional and spatial, and thus they relate to the body directly. So sometimes a sculpture asks that you move around it, or get lower, or try to see above or through, to properly engage with it. I love that a sculpture can pose danger for a viewer, and that is something that was really important in the body of work I planned to make for my senior thesis. All of those things a sculpture can offer are really valuable to me as someone concerned with the experience and effects of looking and being looked at. 

Making sculptures has taught me a lot about how to better control a viewer’s experience with a work, and how that can be done to make the work more effective; I don’t think I would have ever made my way to the experience of my thesis essay if not for making sculpture.

ZJM: You just graduated from MIAD, and I know you have probably had a lot of conversations about what the future holds for you. So maybe rather than ending our interview there, how about just sending out some good energy to the world. What do you think everyone needs to hear right now?

ND: I’m going to take this question literally, I think everyone needs to hear Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘We Almost Lost Detroit’ (the studio version, not the live one) — it’s beautiful. That’s been one of the things helping me get through all of this.

ZJM: Thanks for doing this interview Nick, talk again soon. 

ND: Thank you for having me!