In my work, drawing attention to my body and my thoughts drives me. I wish for flux in the corporeal, yet in the screen I fear entropy and disuse. Exploring themes of fetish, fossil, and impurity, I engage sustainable practices with investigation into electronic waste, anthropogenic predictions, and constant consideration of the lifetime of material. My work aims to create an intimate space in our digital future by considering the body as both the producer and the consumer. Working with materials such as concrete, glass, iron, copper, and aluminum, I fracture and rearrange industrial remnants of urban technological ruin.

The landfill, the thrift store, the alley, and the sidewalks are my sites for collection and transfiguration. Transfigurated specimens become entombed, passing through analog to digital to analog to digital, and oscillating endlessly. Technological ruins become sites; our planet’s geology, trans/cross material-content, relics of the future . Testifying to the vital materiality of the objects I use, my methods of tinkering and mending are pursuing a post-contemporary presentation of data. The matter becomes disfigured, fragmented, shattered. Data is my most valuable resource.

The linen rusts into a slough of sludge. The concrete becomes the earth beneath my feet, a substrate for reprise. The cracks tell fables of hope and I follow them until they split.
The earth is fractured and split by man’s search for value. The obscurity of place, time, and author defines boundaries of digital-surface in analog habitation. My multidimensional self is dug up and flattened. The relic becomes a fragment and the fragment a relic.


Nick D’Alessandro is a Chicago-based artist working in both sculpture and garment whose work investigates our connection to the earth through the aluminum rectangle in our pockets. Set to graduate from the School of the Art Institute in 2023 (BFA), Nick’s work explores themes of technology and waste using print media, sculpture, and garment.