Nighry Shelton: Live Drawing on the Light Board

Nighry Shelton talks about expanding his painting practice into media art at FEED. Community: a cliché often deployed by marketing to leverage the hunger for connection between nodes in our atomized networks. Alas community doesn’t come through social media algorithms, aspirational lifestyles or cars “made with love.” Community comes through a storefront window with an artist inside working. In the instance of Nighry Shelton, it is live drawing on a tablet transformed through video effects onto monitors inside the studio and facing the street. The passerby sees Shelton at work and screens transmitting the signal as morphed and modified. Community is in sharing real time. Community is in seeing the process: in this case, as Shelton says “the transforming of the physical to digital.” Community has an accessibility designed for people to share in an experience. Nighry Shelton live drawing at FEED is intimate, delightful. One could just walk right past it, but don’t.