Nicolas Shake: Space Race

Megan Mulrooney is pleased to present Space Race, our second solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist Nicolas Shake. The exhibition features a new series of works on canvas exploring the the mid-century aerospace industry in Southern California. Throughout the exhibition, Shake considers how the Space Race of the 1950s reverberated across visual and popular culture, transforming a national project into more localized and aesthetics and forms.

The Space Race was more than a technological endeavor aimed at moon exploration. In Southern California, it was a primary economic driver; and nationally, it reframed government spending as a source of national pride and cultural optimism. Workers across sectors participated in the engineering, manufacturing, and distributing of new technologies related to space exploration, generating the enthusiasm that shaped Googie architecture and the broader visual language of Space Age design. 

For Shake, this history is also personal: a fourth-generation Angeleno, his grandfather developed rocket technology for the Apollo missions, and his father worked at Skunk Works, a legendary, clandestine Lockheed division. The work Moonshine and Stealth Recon (SKUNK WORKS) pays homage to this lineage, referencing the Li’l Abner comic strip that gave the division its name and reflecting a time when countercultural figures fascinated with the space frontier and working class laborers alike unified in their shared pursuit.

This subject matter emerges naturally in Shake’s practice, which centers on documenting the commercial idiom and visual vernacular of Southern California. As the 20th-century landscape of roadside signage and idiosyncratic buildings is increasingly demolished to make way for more generic developments, Shake acts as a preservationist of a slowly fading vision of L.A. While his previous exhibition with the gallery utilized Polaroids to index disappearing storefronts, Space Race translates these observations onto canvas. To create these works, Shake employs a process he describes as "expanded photography," using the Mojave Desert as an open-air darkroom. The artist brings large, hand-dyed canvases to the desert, where he covers them with stencils derived from appropriated logos, thereafter exposing them to the elements for months at a time. The sun acts as a developing agent, slowly bleaching the fabric until Shake decides to halt the process. The resulting works, eroded by the desert’s harsh conditions, are often repaired with intricate sewing and patchwork.

Throughout the exhibition, a distinct earth-space duality emerges through the recontextualization of everyday business signage. In Mercury-Atlas 6 (GOD Speed), the familiar Goodyear and Speedway logos are stripped and reassembled to echo the launch of John Glenn to outer space, while Sally Ride (ACE) reframes the Ace Hardware moniker to honor the pioneering female astronaut. By disassembling and sewing together these fragments, Shake constructs a layered visual history that is realized in The highest point reached by a celestial object, which invokes the 1984 Olympic Star, the zenith of human athleticism, as well as a broader notion of human ascent.

This exhibition unfolds against a contemporary backdrop in which space is increasingly shaped by private enterprise rather than national mandate. If the mid-century Space Race mobilized vast networks of labor under the banner of collective ambition, however entangled with Cold War politics, our new horizon is largely one of individual ownership and commercial speculation. In the works on view, however, Shake returns to the material and visual residues of the earlier era. His canvases think through the infrastructures, aesthetics and labor histories that underwrote the aerospace boom in Southern California, tracing how its ambitions were embedded in everyday forms. By foregrounding the weathered logos and stitched surfaces of that world, Space Race brings the celestial down to Earth.

Nicolas Shake (b. 1981, Northridge, CA) lives and works between Los Angeles and Pearblossom, CA. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008, and his MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2011. Shake was an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in 2019. He has exhibited with Megan Mulrooney, Los Angeles; Galerie Timonier, New York; Rogers Office, Los Angeles; and Brant/Timonier, Palm Beach, FL; among others.