Nate Sexton
@3 years ago with 11 notes
First of all, can you tell us a little about yourself, where you’re from, what you do, what your excited about at the moment?My name is Nathaniel Charles Sexton. I go by Nate. I’m twenty-one years old. I live about an hour out of Chicago, in Northwest Indiana, a town called Valparaiso. I really hate having a job. So, I try my hardest to avoid having to get one, although, now, because of my classes next semester, I’m going to have to get a job to maintain a car. This whole car and money thing should be preoccupying me, but I’m really irresponsible so I’m just ignoring it. I go to school for philosophy and English literature, but I want to pursue a doctorate in film studies. I spend most of my free time watching movies, doing that internet thing, or having fun with my friends. What am I excited about? I really want to make a road trip out to Yellowstone National Park before the end of this summer, that’s something I’m very excited for. Oh, and at the end of this month Music Box Theatre is playing John Carpenter’s The Thing as a midnight movie - a bunch of friends and I are going up, it should be good. I like to be naked. I’m a hard determinist. I’m probably the happiest person I know.
How did you begin in photography and what does it mean to you now? I would like to say I began a long time ago as a small child, watching horror movies from the 1980’s and becoming absolutely obsessed and horrified by the images within them. But, that’s sort of abstract. Really, a friend of mine has a rather profound love for disposable cameras; after I had spent way too much money on instant film, it served as a great inspiration for trying something new. That was about a year ago. Ever since, I’ve been shooting. Now, it’s all about making life more interesting. Taking pictures really makes you look at things and imagine a frame floating over it all. It makes images more beautiful, no matter how common they are. For that reason alone, photography is very important to me.
A lot of your work is of your friends. What part do they play for you in your photography? My friends are inspiration, models, and rides. Seriously. they’re the people I surround myself with. I like them, and I wouldn’t want to see anyone more in my own photographs. Plus, it’s a lot easier and a lot more fun to give them direction, if a photograph is staged. I mean, I like putting my models in uncomfortable physical positions.
Do you have a favourite photograph? What’s its story? One of my favorites is definitely of that chandelier in the reverb chamber, up in Chicago. Some friends of mine live in a great apartment building off of Clark or something. The whole building looks and feels like an old hotel. Anyways, the door has a little hexagonal room, with a super high ceiling. Because of the shape of the room, any sound verbs like crazy. We call it the reverb chamber, and drum on the radiator down there. In the center, hanging there, is this fantastic chandelier. I snapped a photo in the middle of a little drum session. I guess even if my friends aren’t in the photographs, they’re still there.
Who is the girl with the red hair? That would be Alyssa Johnson. She has really pretty hair. She’s very sensitive and has a very serious anxiety problem.
I spy with my internet stalking eye that you’ve recently been included in Blood of the Young’s first zine. What do you think about online shows and collectives like this? Oh, these are amazing and very important. The information age had done a lot for a lot of people, but it almost seemed like visual artists had fallen behind musicians, storytellers, and other folk who were taking greater advantage of the internet to share, inspire, and communicate. Now, I’m not sure. I think we’re all doing a phenomenal job. White spaces are awesome, and I would love to find myself somewhere like that someday, but the virtual space is perhaps a more formidable force: it is bound to have more freedom, more diversity, more ideas, more… just about everything other than price tags and crooked frames. You have a greater reach, in terms of immediate exposure, and just an easier and more accessible means of distribution. It’s pretty awesome. The physicality of print has its power, that’s no doubt. Nonetheless, these digital collectives and virtual galleries are really coming into their own, and a strong sense of minimalist and or modern design is really proving it all.
Why ‘no sex, bone dragon’? “NoSex,” is an affirmation of my practiced Epicureanism. Epicureanism is the enlightened hedonistic school formed by the ancient Greek philosopher, Epicurus. Epicurus was a bad ass who argued that having sex is sweet, but reading a book or tending to a garden could be sweeter; he was the first philosopher to give qualitative values to pleasures, other than say “bad” or “good.” Uhm, bone dragons just create a great visual image. Dragons are enormous monsters that swallow men whole, and here is this resurrected dragon, stripped of his scales and think flesh… just bones. I have this whole goblin thing, I don’t really know.
