Nathaniel C. Praska

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Nathaniel C. Praska (b. 1985, Portland, OR) uses his background as a traditional landscape painter, creating layered pieces while also treating them with an immediacy like that of someone scrawling on a wall under an interstate bridge. Praska embraces the detritus of the abandoned places in his environment and transmogrifies what’s found there to communicate oblique signifiers or direct symbols that reflect anxiety, absurdity, isolation, and paranoia. Linked with these aspects, Praska renders quotidian objects and monstrous analogies, developing a visual vocabulary for both the emergent understanding concerning the diseases of despair and the precarity of the post-1980s socio-economic paradigm. Praska has received grants and residencies from the Calligram Foundation, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, Oregon Arts Commission, and Rockland Woods and has exhibited his work throughout the United States. He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Photo credit Mario Gallucci