Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Sculpture, woodworking, drawing
Website: johanssonprojects.com/artist/jay-nelson
Jay Nelson lives and works in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset neighborhood with his wife, artist Rachel Kaye, and their two daughters. He received his BFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and his MFA from Bard College in New York. He has been an artist in residence at the Facebook Artist in Residence Program, where he designed experiential meeting rooms in Frank Gehry’s Building 20, and at the Lucid Art Foundation in Inverness, where he and Kaye spent two months living and working in the home of the late artist JB Blunk — a residency that proved formative for both their practices. He is represented by Johansson Projects in Oakland.
Nelson works in wood, building functional and sculptural structures at the intersection of architecture, craft, and fine art — mobile dwellings, custom camper vans, treehouses, boats, surfboards, cabins, and gallery-scale installations. His aesthetic has been described as “hippie mid-century”: organic forms, exposed post-and-beam framing, salvaged and milled redwood, a preference for small intimate spaces in which every detail is considered. His large-scale pencil drawings of landscapes were his earliest recognized work, and drawing remains a consistent thread through his practice. He is deeply embedded in San Francisco’s surf culture, particularly around Mollusk Surf Shop in the Outer Sunset, and his practice refuses to distinguish between making art and making a life: the custom van he built for champion surfer Rob Machado, the porthole window he cut into his family’s Victorian home, and the plywood exhibition structures he builds for his own shows all emerge from the same sensibility. He has worked with Patagonia and has exhibited nationally and internationally.
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