January 2023 First Friday
Featuring Triston James and JJ Nichols
ARTIST EXHIBITION - J.J. NICHOLS
ARTIST BIO
My name is JJ Nichols. I’m from Vienna, VA and have been living in Fredericksburg for almost 4 years. I’m a skateboarder that likes to skate transition, do landscaping, study philosophy, and make collages. I started doing collages in 2021 after becoming interested in the futurist painters of the 1920’s. The Italian futurists conveyed speed and progressive advancement with a chaotic fusion of technology and nature. These characteristics were my general inspiration for trying to recreate that in collage form using skateboarding media. It’s fun to imagine the future with images of the past. My cousin Jordan Pryor who works in a gallery in Atlanta helped a lot. We would skate and he gave me a lot of ideas on how to improve them. The guy is crazy on an electric unicycle. The important thing to me is to keep improving the method and I’ve learned it’s even healthy to go through phases of hating and loving your work after it’s done. Just like with skating, it’s OK to be frustrated if you keep doing things you’ve never done. Just have to ride the wave of momentum when it arrives.
