Detail from Nicholas Skowron's 15 Minute Installation.
Rustbelt sweetheart Nicholas Skowron has received The Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. The artist is contemplating utilizing his cash prize towards an artistic collaboration at a print publisher somewhere warm, but may use it up paying rent.
The Kent State University professor is best known for explaining his fascination with run down factories with fancy words like these, "My studio practice investigates the visual vocabulary of derelict or abandoned architectural structures by creating work that depicts invented worlds and landscapes of ruin. The structures in these worlds reference real building typologies and practices but are rendered in a style that is fragmentary and in flux."
Skowron is a Flash Collective founding artist, co-curator of Paper Jam and can grow a really nifty beard. Huzzah!