Nick Drain

  • Nick Drain

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 politics of visibility in order to understand the complex relationship of blackness and Black people to 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.

Artist Statement

Through my practice, I work to understand the relationship between Blackness and visibility at the site of the camera to contend with the ways that the photographic medium works, and is used, to perform violence on Black people. My work is an effort to imagine new ways for Black peoples to perform dark sousveillance; a term coined by Simone Browne as “the tactics employed to render one’s self out of sight” specifically regarding “racializing surveillance”. I locate my practice at the ​intersection of the history of Black photographic representation and the future of Black people amidst widening utilizations of the image within contemporary surveillance practices.​ ​There, the camera is representative of not only itself, but the greater societal, governmental, and social systems within which images function; rendering sculpture, writing, and the image as apt vehicles to describe this point of intersection and begin to push beyond it.

The works presented in this exhibition acknowledge the omnipresence of surveillance technologies that perpetuate this violence, and engages both existing and imagined methods, for Black people to render themselves visible and invisible at will.​ ​The ultimate aim of my practice is to rotate the viewer—subject—maker relationship present in figural representations, placing the Black subject at the top and thus ​reconfiguring the surveilling power dynamic between those who are privileged to observe through the white gaze, and those who are rendered hypervisible by their Blackness.

Stay in touch

Sign up to receive exhibition announcements and news.