Nate Lewis: Tuning The Signals

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present Tuning the Signals, New York-based artist Nate Lewis’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from February 8 to March 29, 2025.

Tuning the Signals marks the debut of Lewis’s latest body of work, featuring twelve sculpted pieces on paper alongside a new video that showcases the artist’s focus on systems, patterns, and their intersections within the natural and cultural landscapes we inhabit. Lewis is renowned for his intricate figurative works on paper, which combine elements of photography, drawing, painting, printmaking, and paper sculpting to create textures reminiscent of cellular tissue and topography. His techniques are shaped by his background as a critical care nurse and his interest in the diagnostic aspects of medicine, as well as his understanding of the body on both macro and microscopic levels.

Primarily utilizing black and white, Lewis subtly integrates color into his otherwise monochromatic studies. The monochrome theme relates to the aesthetics of X-ray imagery; Lewis further elaborates on this connection by comparing X-ray imaging to various printing methods. For him, using black and white also conveys the distinct moods of each piece, which he contextualizes as movements within a symphony or musical score. The figures are depicted mid-movement, with limbs intertwined against backgrounds of embossed textures, fabric rubs, colored inks, and curvilinear shapes. Their motion introduces a human element, enhancing the choreography present in nature–movement patterns resembling those of bird migration or the flow of the wind. Each composition uniquely captures the sensation of the motion it represents through the patterns etched into the paper’s surface.

Lewis’s works portray dancers and capoeiristas in motion. After years of studying and practicing capoeira–an Afro-Brazilian martial art that blends acrobatics, music, ritual, and self-defense—Lewis is attuned to the intricate physicality of the art as well as its political and cultural history. Likewise, in Lewis’s predominantly black works, the frottaged musical score embeds a historical act of cultural resistance. This score originates from William Still Grant, who composed Symphony No. 1 Afro-American Symphony, the first symphony created by an African American and performed by a major orchestra in 1931. Lewis’s figures vibrantly ebb and flow with the notes of the symphony’s arrangement.

In Lewis’s newest video, A Clandestine Exchange, Ben Lamar Gay’s song Any Train We Can Catch reverberates, setting the tone as the soundtrack for miniature figure paper doll capoeiristas playing together, manipulated by his friend and training partner, Professor Peixe Boi, who has nearly two decades of training in capoeira. The dolls translate the movements of capoeira on a small scale, contorting their limbs to demonstrate Peixe Boi’s skillful mastery and understanding of bodily kinetics at a micro-scale. The paper dolls ‘playing’ are juxtaposed with a shadow of Peixe imitating the movements using only his hands. Additionally, blurred imagery of photos showing Peixe and a fellow capoeirista playing together is presented in the video, encouraging the viewer to consider clarity and obfuscation in language. The paper dolls materially connect to Lewis’s work and relate to his project of interpreting dance through the medium of paper, as well as translating movement through different disciplines and lenses.

Throughout the exhibition, Lewis’s project draws connections among the arts and science, organic and man-made materials, medicine, and movement; his unique perspective on the shared threads between these disparate disciplines provides an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the systems of embodiment