Treating the paper like an organism itself, I sculpt patterns akin to cellular tissue and anatomical elements, allowing hidden histories and patterns to be uncovered.
Artist Nate Lewis formerly worked as a nurse, and that experience of attending to human bodies and seeing their complexity through medical imagery is critical to his work. Layering patterns and textures into altered photographs, he challenges us to look from multiple perspectives—to see similarly to how doctors use scans and samples to understand an illness.
This image is one of many based on Lewis’s photographs of monuments, here a statue of Charles Aycock, long known as North Carolina’s “Education Governor.” While Aycock did advocate for school reforms, he was also a White supremacist who agitated for a coup that decimated the Black community of Wilmington in 1898. By splicing a photograph of the statue with images of internal organs, Lewis dissects our image of Aycock—reminding us that history is rarely as straightforward as monuments suggest.
