Come on up to the Learning Commons to see the colourful skateboard decks painted by artist Harvey Nichol.
Harvey is a first-generation immigrant and multidisciplinary artist who is currently pursuing a BFA at Alberta University of the Arts, majoring in Sculpture and minoring in Printmaking.
His work embodies elements of various art movements such as neo-expressionism, social realism (in the Philippines), street and folk art which he married to create his version, which he coined as "Street Folk Expressionist Art."
Harvey moves between different art-making practices such as painting, sculptures, clothing design and storytelling. Inspired by his life experience as an immigrant, becoming homeless as a youth, and living through the foster system, he channels all of this through visual auto ethnography (self-reflection exploring personal experience and connecting it to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings) along with elements of folklore and mythologies and socio-political commentary on today's world.
"I painted in black and white for the first few years of my time here in Canada; the melancholy feel that my paintings expressed was coherent with my feelings of depression and of being different; it was about my identity and where I fit in this country. The melting-pot that is Canada, made fitting in or sticking with traditions a choice that I had not anticipated being difficult before I moved."
