About — NICK PEDERSEN

BIO

Nick Pedersen is a photographer, digital artist, and educator based in Salt Lake City, Utah. He holds a BFA degree in Photography, as well as an MFA degree in Digital Arts from Pratt Institute in New York. Pedersen’s work combines his own photography, digital collage, and printmaking techniques to create elaborate, photorealistic images focusing on environmental issues. A main theme in his work is “beautiful decay,” creating large-scale pieces that reveal a satirically, post-apocalyptic vision of the not-too-distant future. Pedersen’s artwork has been shown in galleries across the country and internationally, including the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Paradigm Gallery, and the Griffin Museum of Photography. He has published two artist books featuring his long-term personal projects Sumeru and Ultima, and his work has been featured in publications such as Vogue, Juxtapoz, and Hi-Fructose. Pedersen has also completed artist residencies at the Banff Center in Canada, the Gullkistan Creative Residency in Iceland, and the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art.

STATEMENT

My artwork is primarily inspired by my experience with nature and environmentalism. It is specifically motivated by my concern for the future due to the effects of climate change, and many other environmental impacts humans have had on the planet. My goal with these projects is to visually depict this modern conflict between the natural world and the manmade world in interesting and provocative ways. In my work, I create elaborate, photorealistic images exploring environmental issues of the Anthropocene, an age marked by the human impact on nature. From climate change and more extreme weather events to loss of habitat, biodiversity, and species extinctions, our planet is quickly approaching a strange and unpredictable future. I portray this as an epic struggle and in my work these forces clash in theatrical, post-apocalyptic battlegrounds.

RESUME / CV

DETAILS

All of my projects are created using my photography. Much of my work includes imagery collected from cities, capturing scenes of urban decay like buildings overgrown with vines and industrial ruins. The images of animals come from the wild, zoos, aquariums, and museums of natural history. Finally, many of the landscapes and image details are taken traveling around the US and also many different countries to capture the best source material.

PROCESS

To create my images, I use a complex process of digital imaging and each project is made up of dozens or more photographs meticulously pieced together. I spend a lot of effort building up an image, developing the lighting, shadows, color, and other visual effects to make it look realistic and seamless. Each piece is carefully planned out and created as an intricately layered construction, which is what gives it such a hyper-real and illustrative quality.