Jason McCoy Gallery is pleased to inaugurate the fall season with Symmetry Breaking, featuring new paintings and drawings by New York based artist Nick Lamia. This will be the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Nick Lamia’s abstract paintings, drawings, and complex mixed-media installations are rooted in a concrete contemplation: the co-existence of society and nature as complementary parts of a single system.

It is a subject that has captivated Lamia since his early twenties when studying Environmental Science at U.C. Berkeley and spending years in the wilderness of the Sierra Nevada and on the ocean as an offshore expedition leader. The observations he gathered both in nature and the urban landscape, which he has called home for the past fifteen years, inform an artistic practice that is firmly rooted in the plein-air landscape tradition. In the spirit of 19th Century Romanticism, Lamia focuses on nature as a catalyst for enlightenment. Though this body of work is strictly abstract and thus linked to the modernist canon, nature remains its major source of inspiration.

This is reflected in the exhibition title, Symmetry Breaking, a term borrowed from physics, which describes a phenomenon where small fluctuations acting on a system decide its fate. "I see this idea as very similar to the way a painting, or any artwork for that matter, arrives at a final form", states Lamia. “The miniscule fluctuations, in the case of an artwork, are the small imperfections, irregularities and unexpected things that happen during the course of creating the image that end up nudging me in one direction or another as I make my decisions about what actions to take on the canvas. The wavering of a line here, the uncontrolled drip there, the unplanned and unpredictable events that happen while painting naturally play a part in determining the outcome of the artwork, sometimes changing its trajectory altogether.”

Lamia’s compositions are characterized by linear, diagrammatic structures that are contrasted with biomorphic planes of lush color. They are evocative of architectural structures, aerial views of vast landscapes, or as Lamia puts it “fragmentary maps of imagined spaces, where nature and technology can meet on even ground.”

Nick Lamia lives and works in New York City. He received his MFA in painting from Boston University in 2000. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, as well as residencies at Wave Hill, The MacDowell Colony, the Robert Blackburn Print Workshop and the Triangle Artists Association. Recent exhibitions include projects at Rutgers University, NJ; Seton Hall University, NJ; the Bronx Museum of Arts, NY; Wave Hill, NY and the Maine Center for Contemporary Art.