nothing matters everything matters [Nick Madden]

NICK MADDEN

I’m reading The Future of the Mind by Michio Kaku.  

It’s a great combination of scientific information about the brain and sci-fi what-if’s about the near future, mechanisms that can be attached to your gray matter and used to send messages over the Internet or power once paralyzed limbs.  Beyond conveying all the amazing things that have been learned about the brain, the book drives home the fact that we are all chemicals and molecules and atoms.  Just that.  Chemicals and molecules and atoms.  These make up our memories, emotions, personalities --basically our entire reality.  We’re a bowl of bubbling goo with a body attached to it. 

This is all simultaneously liberating and heart-breaking.  If you’re a romantic artist like me you want to believe that what you are doing is crucial and special.  I want to be the only me.  I want to believe that I belong here.  That what I’m doing matters.  

So rather than attempt any further verbalization of this hefty topic, I’m going to share, instead, a video loop from a project I’m working on starring artist Jordan Stubbs throwing a plastic cube into a creek.  All I can say about it all is - “mood”.  

| all content is property of the artist |

//

Nick Madden is an artist living and working in Decatur, Georgia. He received his BFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Georgia in 2002 and since then has been creating art and teaching young students. Nick has shown his work at galleries across Georgia, including Athens Institute of Contemporary Art, MINT, Beep Beep, and Eyedrum. He is a Hambidge Fellow, a resident of The Creatives Project, and is a current Wathall Fellow. Madden's work centers around the movement and inevitable breakdown of the human body, and the emotional connections we make with art and each other.