Donny Nie

SAIC SHOWS 2022 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Graduates

SAIC SHOWS 2022 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Master of Fine Arts in Studio, Fiber and Material Studies

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Donny Nie (b. 1997) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago and Toronto. Nie received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), and a BFA from OCAD University. She has exhibited in Canada, the United States, and China. Her works are collected by corporations such as Macdonald’s Canada, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, and Greenland Minerals. From large-scale oil painting, monotype, digital projection, to small-scale ceramic and glass form, Nie’s interdisciplinary abstractions coalesce to manifest an intuitive, gestalt experience. Her mediums examine proximity as a visual and metaphorical instrument to simplify or complicate information over different courses of materialities, and eventually inform each other in the same exhibition space.

Eye of a Plum, 2021, Blown and hot-sculpted glass, 14 x 7 x 5 in., Photo by Donny Nie

Fry, 2021, Lampworked soft glass, 3 x 1 x 1 in., Photo by Donny Nie

Rock Pearl, 2021, Blown and hot-sculpted glass, lostwax cast glass, 9.5 x 4.5 x 4.5 in., Photo by Donny Nie

Dew, Glazed stoneware, lampworked glass, and oil paint, 4 x 3 x 2 in., Photo by Donny Nie

Donny Nie - Pink Gold and Milk (close-up)

Pink Gold and Milk (close-up), 2021, Watercolor and MX dye monoprint, 25.5 x 40 in., Photo by Donny Nie

Painting is the matrix of my practice, my device to process time in various paces: stretch one mark to an animation, or reduce one memory to an impression. My research ponders painting as a virtual identity, a persona with encoded privacy and portals of disclosure. My paintings maintain a rectangular format to construct a framework for my sculptures: my brushstrokes in an immersive space, to break the conventions as a mean to violate, exceed, or liberate.

My prints and digital images focus on the exhaustion and exuberance of a two-dimensional imagery, through an accumulative illusion illustrating an overwhelming potential in composition. My sculptures meditate singular gestures, contextualize a brushstroke by projecting it into a three-dimensional capacity. They are aspiring objects suspended between paradoxical states: an abstraction that is a molten physicality, an illusion of ephemerality that crystallizes to pursue permanence.

Via transformation in both optical and chemical states, mystified alchemy of my artwork draws attention onto a sensual experience to exemplify the state of proximity. I am driven by an obsession with transparency as a metaphor to capture the impossibles, the invisibles, the ethereality. The works materialize as a desire to archive, control, and situate within an ever-changing time.

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