Video – Nicole Rademacher

Portfolio Categories Video

Official website for artist Nicole Rademacher

Nicole Rademacher, Rademacher artist, Los Angeles, Chile, Barcelona, interdisciplinary, research-based, contemporary artist, conceptual artist, adoptee, adoptee voices, social practice artist, public practice artist, art therapy

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Being Adopted

Being Adopted is a three-part participatory installation exploring the emotional landscape of adult adoptees through crowdsourced words, immersive environment, and a two-channel video. An online questionnaire asked self-identified adult adoptees: “If you could choose any 3 words to describe your experience as an adoptee, which ones would you choose?” 252 people from 16 countries responded, generating 371 distinct words.

Each participant’s three words, name (as they identified), and country were hand-written onto colored index cards, creating a physical archive of adoptee voices. These cards are suspended at varying heights throughout the installation space using fishing line and lead weights — the fishing line evoking invisibility, the varied heights suggesting the scattered, non-hierarchical nature of adoptee experiences. The suspended cards create two curtain-like walls to form an intimate room within the larger gallery space.

Inside this room, two chairs face a two-channel video installation. On one channel, the artist plays the childhood game of Memory with cards displaying the individual words, revealing both shared themes and divergences across adoptee experiences. The second channel presents an abstract, rhythmic counting and display of all 371 words. A coffee table between the chairs holds card sets, inviting visitors to play their own game of Memory: mirroring the fragmented, repetitive work of piecing together identity. The fine-tip Sharpie used to inscribe the words bled through the paper; thus, while playing Memory and the cards are face down, they display shadow-traces visible before the words themselves are revealed. This sequence, encountering residue before source, echoes the adoptee experience of piecing together identity from fragments.

The installation transforms data into embodied experience: visitors must move through the suspended cards to enter the viewing space, physically navigating the density of adoptee voices. The participatory game element shifts viewers from passive observers to active participants in the work of making connections and seeking patterns: the same labor adoptees perform in understanding our experiences within the broader community context.

252

total respondents

countries represented

371

distinct words used

The project is ongoing… Are you an adult adoptee?

What are your three words?

Nesting

Nesting is a six-channel video installation exploring the intimate moments of early motherhood through a scattered yet connected viewing experience. Ten short videos are distributed across six devices of varying sizes mounted at different heights in the corner of a gallery space, creating a constellation of moving images that viewers can navigate individually or with another seated viewer.
Through unique editing and unconventional framing, the work examines concepts of intimacy and attunement as they manifest in the mother-child relationship. The installation’s design mirrors the fragmented yet interconnected nature of early parenting—moments of connection scattered across time and space, requiring the viewer to move between screens much like a parent moves between the multiple demands of caregiving.
The varying device sizes reference the different scales of attention motherhood requires, from the intimate close-up moments captured on smaller screens to broader contexts displayed on larger ones. A single bluetooth speaker provides audio that drifts across the installation space, creating an sonic environment that unifies the fragmented visual narrative. The idea that two people can listen to the audio at once, offers another level of intimacy while experiencing the work.
By documenting my time with my son during his early years, I examined my own insecurities about mothering and belonging, questions that the installation format extends to viewers as they navigate their own relationship to the intimate scenes unfolding across multiple screens.

Gate Pass

Gate Pass explores correlations between private and public gestures of familial protection as interpreted through the fixture of home gates. I examined ideas of privacy and protection through interviews and observations of the people who lived behind or passed through the gates in the Central Province of Kenya while on a 3-month residency; my research revealed a shared need for security and the lengths we go to achieve a sense of safety and stability. Gate Pass documents these impeding physical boundaries through photography and video, exploring the daily occurrences both inside and outside the gates, while revealing connections of intimacy and formality, alienation and belonging, security and vulnerability.

Installed at Los Angeles International Airport for 6 months in 2017, Gate Pass sought to create a dialogue with air travelers about security measures, a collective component of the air travel experience, encouraging reflection on issues of trust and protection.

The project was made possible through a residency with Maji Mazuri Centre in Nairobi, Kenya and received funding from many individual donors, North Carolina Arts Council, and the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

All photos by Panic Studio LA

Potential Spaces

A projected video installation investigating space between members of bi-cultural couples as artifacts of an amalgamated personal culture. Referencing the principle of potential energy in physics, Potential Spaces considers “space” a field of action while simultaneously making action possible.

This project was made possible with help from Alfred University and a residency at La Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France.

You are a Perpetual Tourist

You are a Perpetual Tourist is a series of sixty-two short (and micro) experimental documentaries exploring ideas of longing and distance between children and adult family members in public space as expressed through gesture.

The book Longing & Distance: through gesture is a companion piece.

Exhibited at: Fosdick-Nelson Gallery, Alfred, NY; E.H. Little Fine Arts Center, Charlotte, NC; the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China; Local Project, Queens, NY; Consulate of Chile in New York, NY; Centro de Arte Digital en Memoria de Juan Downey, Puerto Varas, Chile; and Arena 1 Gallery, Santa Monica, CA.

Footage was gathered over 4 years in Tucson (AZ), Chicago, New York, Panama Canal, Panama City Airport, Valparaiso (Chile), Viña del Mar (Chile), Mendoza (Argentina), Buenos Aires, and Miami.

This project was partially funded through the State University of New York Graduate Diversity Fellowship.

Reciprocal Strategies

The work was founded on the idea of mashing the ping-pong of a conversation with the collective assemblage of an exquisite corpse: one artist would make a short video quickly, sending it to the other artist. Then the next artist would make another short video quickly in response, sending that to the other artist. The end product is an installation that can be understood as a series of monologues and/or conversations between the videos, some being self-evident, while others relying on the interaction in the space with the other videos and with the viewers inhabiting the projection of other videos in order clearly see one.

Reciprocal Strategies was a collaboration with Cassidy Petrazzi.