THE LOCAL - SIGNED

Nick Meyer grew up in a small industrial town in western Massachusetts and since its youth, the city's terrain has been in constant evolution, with houses and shops continually being erected, razed and rebuilt in the abyss left by disintegrated industries. The Local documents a city caught between aspiration and decline, a deeply moving narrative personnel that reveals the struggles, the tumult and the daily life that takes place take place in a place that, from the outside, seems stuck in stasis. The experience described here is one of strangeness and familiarity: the rhythm of the change may be recognizable, but the parameters have changed, the Opioid addiction and economic crises joining the steady pace from deindustrialization to define deep volatility. With the trope The United States' "left behind" now a familiar invocation, the Meyer's work offers a uniquely positioned assessment of this figurative non-place, tracing its links with particular people and the topography of an individual city. In this way, the representation studied harsh socio-economic realities is transformed into something more mythical but no less striking. Meyer's hometown becomes a multi-level, poetic and often ghostly space, reminiscent of TS Eliot's The Waste Land and William Carlos Williams' Patterson. Moving between past and future, face and landscape, details of texture and Meyer's vast picture, changing perspectives, demand a Reconsidering what is 'local': what makes a place a place in the homogenized landscape of post-industrial capital and what attitude or how close it could be revealed. Nick Meyer (born 1981) lives in Western Massachusetts. He is the recipient of the Pace Gallery Award and the Barclay Simpson Prize. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Massachusetts College of Art and his MFA from California College of the Arts. His book project Either Limits or Contradictions (Daylight 2017) has appeared in TIME Lightbox, Huck Magazine, Museum, The Eye of Photography and Ain't-Bad. Meyer's work has been presented nationally and international and is part of many private collections.