Hi, my name is Nick D’Alessandro. I grew up in rural Massachusetts. I moved to Chicago for school and have been living here since. I’m on my phone a lot, I have trouble keeping still, and I wrote this on an airplane.

My process is dependent on the site. I walk a lot, especially at night. I go to the thrift store at least twice a week. Sometimes I know what I am looking for, other times I don’t.

I am always looking for objects that have reached the point after being used as intended and now exist as artifacts of who used them or how. Think a pair of jeans with a big hole in the inseam, headphones run over by a car, or a corroded electrical box. I gather a lot of material like this, and try to use all of it. In making the work, I attempt to synthesize these materializations of use by either myself, a previous stranger, or those who come to see the work. Some fragments are hyper-fragile, some fugitive, some everlasting, and others’ timelines uncertain.

Specifically speaking on the work for hardboiled, I noticed the first time I walked up that the gallery is positioned near this grass highway median that faces an Audi dealership. I walked up the median and let the cars toss my hair around. It reminded me of how I felt in Iceland when I was interacting with the ambivalently threatening landscape. Walking somewhere to enjoy something that maybe I shouldn’t be, or isn’t for me. I knew the show would be in the early fall, and the tops of the blades of grass would be starting to turn that chamomile yellow color. I’ve had this sulfur stuffed in a sock that I brought home from Iceland last summer that is a kind of caffeinated shade of that same yellow, these blades of grass my friend Arden cast in bronze for me in early spring, and a chipped acrylic cube my friend Zola was getting rid of. By the time the exhibition closes, the bronze sprouts should patina into a spring green again while the grass on the floor will dry up.

I knew the moment I walked in I wanted to drywall a section of the space to mimic the flat dealership exterior. The video would not have existed if not for my friend Biffy, who recovered the footage months after I thought I had completely destroyed the tape. It is pretty mundane footage of the landscape, my feet, the ground blurring into pixels of pigment. It feels precious to me because when Biffy texted it to me, it had been so long that it was like I was seeing footage someone else had shot. I cut a hole in the wall the exact size of my phone so I would have to put my phone there whenever the show is open.

I wrapped the floor in t-shirts soaked in alum, and sewed them together on site. I’m hoping enough people walk on the floor by the time the show comes down that the grass leaves an impression. There was a cutout in the floor that was the exact size of a smartphone. I had a privacy screen that fit it and some extra acrylic. The old porn clipping is mostly just cheeky and intimate. 

Sorry, I told myself I would try to make this short, In short: a lot of my process involves freezing and recovering moments at which objects were used for specific amounts of time, and how this affects their value.

My best friend made me a scent that I wear almost every day. It’s my only one right now.