All photos by Robert Chase Heishman
ARTIST INTERVIEW
NATHAN PECK: DREAM MACHINE
As a teacher and a practicing artist, I think a lot about the feedback loop between teaching and creating. I asked Nathan Peck how teaching fits into his art practice.
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I’ve taught full time at SXU for 20 years. I love to have that consistency of location, to build on a program over many years, and to see the evolution of the student body.
Creating community is central to everything I do. I come from small, supportive communities both in art school and in my hometown. I thrive in small groups of people who enjoy working together.
It’s never possible to get everybody to care about everything, but you can get groups of people to care about stuff together. Early on in Chicago, I plugged into The People’s Republic of Delicious Food, a weird list serve art group that would say hey we’re doing this thing on this day, and you would show up wherever with your thing, and blast it into whatever was going on… sometimes night clubs, sometimes galleries, sometimes on the street. And I thought, how can we apply that at SXU? We can do bigger things if we work together.
I moved into a loft with other art teachers, and we all had frustrations with institutional limitations on our ideas. We said, let’s start our own art school! We took some of the most engaged students from our various schools, and put them together into a glorious sub-community.
More recently, I’ve moved to Beverly to plug into the community here. Students see my work in progress at school. Sometimes they’ll riff off of a direction I have, and I get inspired in turn. And with a group of us working on various iterations of tech-based projects, we can test the logistics of a concept better than any one person could.
When iPads first came out, and the University – like all universities – bought 200 of them, I asked the person in charge of instructional tech: when these are obsolete, can I please have them all? So that eventually happened. My class made sculptures with them. Most of my materials are part of the university waste stream. The wood is all scraps from our laser cutter. They’re exactly the size of the cutter bed; when you stack them up they fit perfectly, and the negative spaces interact.
My sabbatical was in 2020, and I had the entire art building to myself. When I do the same thing all day, whether it’s art or factory work, I tend to work a third shift in my sleep. After working in the studio for eight hours, I’d make another ten pieces in my sleep, some very absurd. I started taking very careful notes every morning. I can forget how important absurdity is to the creative process. It pushes boundaries.
Eventually what I did during the day became material to work on in my sleep. Then I built on it the next day. That working model created the Dream Machine.
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