Richard Emery Nickolson

While trying to describe certain places and memories, one might mention the Washington Monument or the Empire State Building and the listener would, in an instant, be able to complete that thought or remember that place through the imagination. Aside from these almost universal examples, there are many more local and personal monuments along with their associated memories. These are equally important. In the mid-west for example, there are church steeples, grain elevators, water towers and smoke stacks that stand as important monuments. They always seem to mark or identify a place along the horizon line.

Unfortunately many of these local monuments are markers of towns that are disappearing. Churches stand empty. Smokestacks stand guardian over long closed factories and water towers are dry. All have now been replaced by the omnipresent microwave radio-relay station, many of which are attached to these otherwise long neglected structures. But in the end, all of these things are beautiful in a certain way. They surely were not made to be beautiful, but only to function. In strange and haunting ways, without artifice or embellishment, they are powerful and beautiful. The essence of my current work as an artist is in some way to rediscover this power and beauty.