2026 SPE Annual Conference: Catalyst for Exchange
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print this pageMold/Glass Book Project
Nick Kline
Friday, November 08 - 2:40PM to 3:25PM
I make photographs that embrace the aesthetics of mid-20th century abstraction yet
attempt to update that history, in part by engaging with social issues. The conceptual
underpinning for my work is an understanding of the nature and impact of psychological
trauma on survivors. The conference topic, Redefining Influence, resonates for me as an
artist as I constantly navigate the relevance of formal vocabulary for contemporary
audiences.
My series of photographs titled Mold, as well as the GlassBook Project (an artwork I do
with my students at Rutgers University) were recently featured in the Photo Review
Journal in an interview with Karen Irvine, Curator, Museum of Contemporary
Photography, Chicago. Our discussion focused on how my photographs grew out of the
advocacy-based work I pursue with my students in making and exhibiting artists' books
on topics of psychological trauma. Karen discusses my photographs in relation to Aaron
Siskind's work because of its approaching the abstract. For the SPE conference, I
propose to present these series. Emphasis will be placed on how, because of my
layered working processes, I feel liberated to embrace a loaded photographic history.
Since 2011, my photographic subjects depict the textured surfaces of molds I create by
taking casts of specific culturally-loaded sites. By gathering impressions using a rubber
compound on architectural facades, earth, and objects as a way to document the sites, I
later photograph the rubber surfaces in the studio. The locations chosen are sites of
traumatic experience made historic through the media.
Some series I've developed using this mold process are: Hate Crimes, of murder sites of
transgendered individuals in Puerto Rico; Gilgo Beach, site of the Ocean Parkway Serial
Killer's dumped bodies; Antietam, of a Civil War battlefield in Sharpsburg, MD; St.
Vincent's Hospital, Greenwich Village, NYC, a former epicenter of the AIDS crisis; and
Sorry You're Here, a suicide destinations in Norway's fjords. Another series, Early
American Architecture, uses the same mold process in Bucks County, PA, and thus
follows in the footsteps of Aaron Siskind who photographed there as well.
A current series in Causapscal, Quebec, Canada, is about a village that historically has
one of the highest suicide-rates in that country. In this work, in addition to the molding
process, I'm starting again to photograph directly. By using an 8x10 view camera, the
work is consciously and anxiously coming into conversation with Edward Weston.
I embrace abstraction to express the impossibility of sufficiently representing trauma
through photojournalism and the context of site. The question I am asking with the work
is: How can the photo-documentary process expand so that the process itself might
expose new meaning and reduce the distance between story and viewer?
The GlassBook Project, 2009-present, has received numerous national awards. Artists'
books focus attention on better understanding responses to trauma that survivors often
experience. Exhibitions at art institutions and federal venues throughout the United
States advocate for changes in human services in an innovative way.
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