Born in the United States, NICKIE BEFUS is currently an artist based out of Denver, Colorado.
This tumblr blog is a digital portfolio of my art from
2008 to present, scroll down the page and click next to see older works.
Through the use of found internet footage, individual internet blogs, photos, chat forums, objects, and traditional mixed media, my work enforces the use of re-appropriation while emphasizing the importance of human interaction and reflection within virtual space as well as the real world.
This on going project utilizes photographs taken in person, collected online and through Facebook, to make general comparisons between people I know, and those I have become acquainted with.
“In fiction and folklore, a doppelgänger, (German “double walker”) is a paranormal double of a living person, typically representing evil or misfortune. In modern vernacular, the word has come to refer to any double or look-alike of a person.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppelg%C3%A4nger
AN ABSTRACT DOCUMENTATION OF DIGITAL EXPLORATIONS Installation and Performance, SUNY Purchase College, May 2011.
With an external webcam and a standard video projector, I perform with strangers through a live website that randomly generates webcam conversations. This interactive video performance attempts to bridge the gap between the virtual world and the real world. By digitally inserting an image of myself next to an anonymous user of the chatroulette-style website, I am able to initiate and imitate live action with each user in my real time. Click the link below to see live documentation of a performance called “Watch Me Shuffle People”
With the School of Art & Design at SUNY Purchase College, and the town of Port Chester New York, SEE SHEEP? is a public art project that fosters an open dialogue in the community through the creation and distribution of faceless, plaster sheep sculptures and images.
For more information about the SEE SHEEP?/VER LAS OVEJAS? project please visit the links below:
This installation utilizes multiple forms of mixed media and recycled material such as cereal boxes, scrap wood, found objects, made objects and a short video to create an autobiographical free standing enclosure. A short video-assemblage literally emphasizes the reflection of past, present and future through a closed circuit video feed, a television and a mirror.
Visit the link below to see more of my installations:
The installation, Female Latex Mask, incorporates two videos, both directly and indirectly corresponding to the images behind the video monitors.
In recognizing the fetish of the celebrity, this project appropriates images and internet footage in order to question the notion of identity and the prospect of anonymity; How is the recognition of a particular face regarded in American cultural? and How has this recognition been morphed into some form of obtainable commodity? What is the value of one’s own identity? How can that value be changed or enhanced?
The project film re-appropriates a culmination of edited, found and recorded internet footage. Welfare Warrior 6:58, exhibits the internet blogs of the a self proclaimed “welfare-a-holic” a 25 year old, white male from Grand Rapids Michigan. By dramatizing themes relating to socioeconomic status, personal experience and documentation the project highlights the sensitivity and innate depth of the original posts, while underlining the distinct aesthetic and cultural value that the internet blog can serve.
Original Welfare Warrior blogs are located on Youtube and LiveLeek.com; the use and re-use of this footage has not been re-appropriated without permission of the Welfare Warrior.
If I Pace Back and Fourth in Direct Rhythm With Those on the Other Side of the Glass, Will My Actions Be Noticed?Live performance, SUNY Purchase, 2010.
Located directly adjacent to the on-campus Starbucks at SUNY Purchase College is an experimental space offered to sculpture majors in the School for the Arts. Called Fort Awesome, this space served as a test site to loosely evaluate social etiquette and architecture for the project If I Pace Back and Fourth in Direct Rhythm With Those on the Other Side of the Glass, Will My Actions Be Noticed? In utilizing the nine, large storefront windows of the project space, I re-contextualized the function of the glass by standing interior of the room to mimic those that passed the exterior of the store front. By mirroring those on the outside of glass I initiated myself within their action and attempted to create a form of non-verbal communication.
Through three separate trials I utilized simple materials of tape, paper and lights to assert the minimal activities I preformed while imitating strangers. In order to answer a simple question in the first trial, I began by picking up the pace of any person who passed the project space storefront windows. In the second trial I “traced” movement of those that passed the window from one end of the room to the other with masking tape. In the final trial a large piece of white butcher paper was stretched across the center of the nine windows, cutting the visual surface area in half while creating anonymity for myself.
Thanks Kippenberger is a minimal installation that was directly inspired by the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective of Martin Kippenberger, in The Problem Perspective, 2009. The excess of object in response to and through the analysis of contemporary art and society reflects no lack of restraint in The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika” yet my interpretation reveals a stripped and paired down version by visual comparison. Reflecting the notion of the physicality represented by a variety of found chairs in relation to the surrounding environment, Thanks Kippenberger positions these ten chairs facing directly towards five tables. . Located in front of the SUNY Purchase College Administrative Building, the backs of the chairs face the front of the building yet they are located only on one side of the table; a one sided assembly that projects outward. Through the chairs are different in size and shape they function the same, in front of the ridged and practical tables that express little in variance and size. Towards the right of the configuration, one square table is held by another, an abstract signifier that this orientation creates nothing but a wall.