Moving rocks with artist Tucker Nichols

I first came across Tucker Nichols' work on his What a Day site, where the artist makes one small work a day and posts it online for all to see. His pieces are deceptively simple and engaged in Nichols' everyday life. One piece could feature the simple scrawl of an advertising phrase, while another could be a mysterious shape that looks like cotton balls trapped in a bird cage. His work seemed to be about taking the things we throw away or don't pay attention to and clarifying them in small, strong compositions, like seeing a city reflected in rainwater that's gathered in a bottle cap.

As much as I liked seeing his work online, I later happened to see his show at a very fancy, upscale gallery in Chelsea and decided to e-mail Tucker to figure out what's going on. Be sure to visit http://www.tuckernichols.com to play along.

Daily Gusto: How did you start creating art?

Tucker Nichols: There was never a break between drawing as a kid and now, really. I started taking drawing more seriously when academia didn't fit the things I wanted to say. The decision to "become an artist" came as a result of admitting that it's what I'd wanted to do all along and that you only get a limited amount of time to live. After I put those things together, I didn't feel I had much of a choice but to at least have a go at it.

Can you describe the process that goes into making one of your "What a Day" pieces?

I make small piles of drawings every day. Most are about the size of an index card, few survive the recycling bin. The website forces me to pick something from the day before and put it on view, so it becomes a kind of logbook of what I've been doing. Like recently I've been cutting up cardboard into lozenge shapes, buildings, fingers and knives. Putting them on view is like settng them free, the viewers help finish them with their comments and emails to me. Sometimes I like to put up drawings that are vague in what they are, sometimes I put up an undeniable pair of boots. Sometimes a bit of text I saw out in the world. It all depends on how I feel that morning about what I did the day before.

What's the difference between seeing one of your pieces online and seeing it in person? What role does the work's placement play while you're creating?

The internet is a new kind of context--so specific to wherever you are and so empty of context at the same time. One person's seeing it at the beach in Miami squinting at their laptop, someone else is at their desk in Bangalore listening to the traffic outside on the street. At the end of the day though, the screen is the same, so showing drawings on it brings this new kind of context into play. When I do site specific work in a gallery or an abandoned military fort, I know something about the physical environment people will be in when they see it. But in either case I'm most drawn to making work that doesn't give much information. I want people to either actively do some work on their own or just walk by and ignore it altogether. The percentage of people who engage with my drawings may be small but my sense is they are feisty. I feel really lucky that way.

How does your creative process differ between gallery work, postcards, commercial illustrations, and corporate lobby installation?

Ideally my approach doesn't change much for any of them--I often try to come back to the question "What would I do if I were in this situation" and then realize oh, I am in this situation. Facing a scrap of cardboard here in my studio, an op-ed assignment for the NY Times, or a corporate commission, if I can come away feeling like I did my thing to their thing I'm usually happy with it. That said, I don't do too well with art direction. I'm told it's a Taurus thing but I think I just have a strong idea of how things should look. I move rocks around the house as if it means something.

I love that you've visited offices and observed employees in order to do your commissioned work for Bravo, etc. So many people spend their time working in an office, yet so little art deals with the subject. Why?

I've wondered about that myself--most companies don't feel they can afford to hire artists to come in and make work in their offices, it just doesn't fit on any line item on the budget. Who can blame them, really. But every corporate project I've worked on has felt like fertile ground for making work right from the start, like a hidden studio. Art about working might not be so interesting but art about the things we think about at work seems worth exploring. There are always big ideas that nobody has time to think about, and when I start interviewing people I find they are thinking about these ideas on the side. I see part of my job as being to figure out what the big ideas are and to make art that somehow brings them into the light where everyone can talk about them freely. I'm working on a project for a major internet portal now and the big ideas are confusingly big. It makes good fodder.

You have a master's degree in East Asian studies, so it's tempting for me to see this Chinese theme of emptiness or void in your work. Can you talk about that?

Studying Chinese painting is what really got me into doing this in the first place. I can remember getting chills seeing a simple ink drawing in a class my freshman year in college--how could a projected slide of something so simple painted 500 yrs ago on the other side of the planet hit me in the gut? On certain days I can see everything I've done since as a futile attempt to understand that question. As I make work, I don't think about Chinese painting too much, but of course it comes out anyhow. Sometimes I'm consciously interested in what happens if I use some of the same tools as some of my heroes from those incredible paintings. But even then, it's not really commentary, more like a question of what happens if I make a drawing in a similar vein--can the spark live here too? I'm as interested in why it does as I am in why it doesn't.