Nathan Huff

Nathan Huff

Home, and other foreign places

• August 25 – October 10, 2025
• Reception Thursday, Sept 25, at 6pm 
• Nathan's Website

From the Artist

I like long pauses in casual conversation. They make me uncomfortable and also delight me. When I make art, I often imagine extending those types of disjointed pauses where silence lingers and possibilities unfold. A half-formed idea will meet a passing image and uncover a latent story or draw out a new narrative. As a multidisciplinary artist I move images through painting, sculpture, and installation forms, each iteration revealing an underlying poetry or expanding the emotional tenor in a situation.

Central to my work is an exploration of delicate balance and precarious control. I often depict domestic spaces, rupturing them with elements from the unfettered natural landscape to evoke a sense of tension and sublime contrast. I use several recurring images. Wooden row boats and airplanes feature prominently offering a seat for an imagined journey.  Schisms in the night sky, are animated by ladders suggesting unfolding narratives, or twisted California oaks contrast a restrained mid-century furniture piece. Utilizing themes of migration, elemental materials of wood and paper, perceived obstacles, and opening vistas, Home, and other foreign places invites an imagined and multilayered representations of the journey towards one another and our relationship to the landscape.  

At times these images are drawn from my personal history, but often they strike a chord with mythology and with broader practices of psychology, place making, and spirituality.  I am fascinated by the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of life. What one does with such incongruous or incomprehensible moments in one’s life is the task of meaning making and it is often in the studio that I can best hold these complicated experiences. I hope that the unexpected pauses in my art might invite deeper understanding of self and generate wonder for the world around us.