2021 Video - The Why & The What

 

 Hilary Nylander, Bio

Hilary Nylander is an artist, creative director and designer based in Marshall, NC - a town of 900 or so people nestled in a deep river valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She was born in rural New Jersey (yup! lotsa cows, horses and corn) about an hour from Manhattan. Upon graduating with honors and a Fine Arts degree from Guilford College she was told NYC was the only way to go. . .

But the starving artist tale was sticky and The City did not cooperate with her introverted nature terribly well… so she forged a creative, but corporate career path instead and moved to Boston. There she further honed her creative eye working for some of the top brands in the northeast as a stylist, visual merchandiser, creative director and brand manager including some rather visually inspiring buying trips to Maison Objet in Paris as well as design studios in Germany and Antwerp.

But the rural roots of her childhood continued to call to her while her eye yearned to create visual art of her own making. In 2017 she moved with her musician husband to Western, NC where they built a home with long views in a town full of creative people forging their own funky paths - and Hilary got to work in a studio of her own.

 

 

Artist Statement

Parsing stories and weaving tales of beauty, place and memory

I have never had a particularly good memory. And our memories, if left to their own devices, are constantly shifting imagery and rearranging the truth of what we saw. I love this breakdown of perfection, this distortion of the truth, as we attempt to hold onto what moved us in some way. 

With a keen eye towards reducing everything to its simplest form or creating a chaos of unrecognizable elements, I find beauty and peace - a means of calming the hectic thoughts and emotions running through this busy brain. And in these reductions beauty seems easier to identify and is hopefully more accessible to everyone.

Reductive photo collages represent a moment in time and a place to be treasured. Painted layers of paper in numbers of 5 or 7 become a haiku to the days of the week, the passage of time and what happened then.