Nancy Tobin Artist of the Year

by Courtney Ramos

Meet Nancy Tobin: Site-specific artist and local Arcata business owner of boutique Vintage Avenger. Her years of elaborate installation and performance art creates a unique narrative that transforms the experience of space and time.

With back-to-back shows in 2022, The first was the vast installation Journey to the Center of Milks exhibit at the Morris Graves Museum, where you entered the surreal prehistoric garden. Greeted by a giant volcano, waterfall, and tortilla tent that were embedded in a carpet of six hundred pounds of corn kernels that took you on a dreamlike journey while giving the metaphorical gift of self-empowerment. Her following show, Outer Roominations, where “Toebin” Estates was a funny take on spiritualism and homesteading that included a foil-covered tent topped with a giant stuffed foot that sprayed water into a 20’ x 15’ pool made of tarps and straw wattles. It kept growing and ultimately incorporated the adjacent cabin and junked car. It lured you in with its lowbrow humor but really told the story of

Jesus’ washing of the feet, which symbolizes humbling oneself to serve others. In addition, she did performance art that will be in her documentary released in late 2023 or 2024, which captures her creative process by award-winning filmmaker Jonathon DeSoto.

Her story begins: Nancy is no stranger to the paradoxes of life. Her narrative is honest and raw, transcending her life’s pain and adversity into bizarre and ephemeral interventions.

Growing up as a military brat and later being a single mother. “I experienced two very difficult sides of life: a great deal of displacement and a lot of responsibility. But, on the flip side, I also experienced many different cultures, landscapes, and climates.” Dualities pull her in every kind of way. Which is apparent in her art.

Nancy’s work is nomadic, ephemeral, and site-specific. She refers to them as either land art, interventions, sculpture, painting, and/or performance. They are flexible in nature, and their primary characteristic is their mutability.

She explains her disjointed childhood was spent playing in what she would later come to realize was a juxtaposition:

“From the sweaty jungles and fort-like military bunkers on post-war Okinawa to adapting to the unforgiving Arizona desert, where man-made swimming holes poked nearly every inch of the city’s concrete skin, affording the lie that survival was somehow due to fitness. I also survived the toe-snatching seventy degrees below zero sub-arctic winds that screamed off the frozen lakes of Madison, Wisconsin, only to be slapped in the face by understanding that they were far warmer than the welcome. I wouldn’t be receive from the insular high school cliques, which I could never seem to penetrate, and be constantly being shown that, under no circumstances, would I ever.” There is a sense of nomadic belonging in her work, no matter who you are.

She collects materials and uses them to create when inspired by a space. Documenting those moments and then, just as quickly, removing them. She likes humor and surprise. Unrestrained by nostalgia, many juxtapositions play a role in Tobin’s installations. Objects like holiday decorations, kewpie doll heads, molded plastic souvenirs, and scary stuffed animals all make you raise a brow at the cheaply made and most often dollar store and thrift store finds that represent the impoverished part of society. She refurbishes these ‘things’ into a magical scene. These juxtapositions deliberately break a familiar reality and evoke existential questions and feelings of surprise. She noticed that something fortuitous occurred each time she was doing an intervention. Unexpectedly, she has had the ocean reunited with a river while filming, and wild animals show up to inspect her work. Once, she even ran into her mail carrier while atop the Ma Le’l Dunes. There is always a surprising element in the familiar that suddenly makes us question our reality, all of what we thought we already knew and have ever experienced. Expecting that something magical would meet her each time, awed at its consistency.

“There was a lot to see, which was good. But, there was a lot I did not want to feel.”

She frequently turned to the landscape of her inner continued on next page making as a defense mechanism. Residing within, she could keep everything she owned, and no one ever parted from her. “My code was to be self-sufficient. I modeled my lifestyle after Gilligan’s Island, where survival depended upon one’s creative problem-solving and everything was made by hand, preferably bamboo.”

Her sculptures and layered installations are an outgrowth of her urge to control the environment by using what is at hand to transport the viewer into a physical and psychological landscape of her imagination, where rooting and nurturing creates surreal spaces to be traveled through and experienced. Enveloping the viewer with central themes of nurturing, adapting, creative reuse, encouragement, and self-belief.

“Too often, we are conditioned to give our power and problem-solving abilities away to others. It is incredibly satisfying to watch the gears click in a viewer’s mind upon experiencing my work and see them come out more inspired and empowered, allowing themselves to take more personal risks while, above all, having fun.”

Engineering within the given space becomes a welcomed challenge and aesthetic element of the work. She works in a forward motion, rarely questioning or reworking first impulses. There are no mistakes.

“To be the freest, I must have spaces unencumbered by constraints, be it financial or otherwise. I prefer remote spaces where I can work in isolation in a type of conversation between myself and my intuition. It’s a form of meditation that helps me hone my faith and self-confidence. The limits then become how much I can construct with only the items I can carry. “

Her gallery work shares similar traits with her untamed art in both response to site and construction techniques, but they differ in that they can be grown further under the safety of a roof, and then they become quite elaborate. She says she is often asked how I know when I am done with a gallery installation? The answer has become, “When the show opens.”

Artist’s Final Note: “My recipe for long-term success in any situation is this: start where you are with what you already have on hand and build from there. Accomplish by applying yourself consistently and figuring it out along the way. Play. Listen to your intuition. Override the negative voices of the doubt when facing challenges. Do not wait for the stars to align before you begin because that day will never come. You really don’t need Amazon to solve all of your problems. Get going, and believe in yourself! It is my life practice, in addition to my art practice, to nurture and encourage self-esteem; after all, happy, confident people make the world a better place!” —Nancy

Scroll on her Instagram @nancy_._tobin for a plethora of visual vocabularies.