Nicolas Shake: Ecstatic Membrane

The ecstasy of the Polaroid is of the same order: to hold the object and its image almost simultaneously […]

-Jean Baudrillard, America

Megan Mulrooney is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Polaroids by Los Angeles-based artist Nicolas Shake. This new body of work focuses on fading signage and storefronts across greater Los Angeles, many of which evoke the mid-century commercial vernacular that once shaped the city’s postwar identity. With an eye attuned to the surreal poetics of urban decay, Shake captures the twilight of a once-hopeful futurism embedded in Googie architecture: its distinctive concrete angles, neon flourishes, and outsized optimism now weathered and sometimes abandoned. The exhibition will be on view from April 5 – May 3, 2025.

Rendered in the format of the Polaroid, each image functions doubly as picture and artifact. The materiality of instant film--its unpredictable color shifts, chemical blemishes, and modest scale--mirrors the fragility of the architectural subjects it frames. In Shake’s hands, the Polaroid becomes more than a tool for instant capture: it becomes a container for cultural memory, preserving architectural fragments in a medium that itself feels impermanent, already slipping into obsolescence.

Shake’s broader practice spans painting, sculpture, and photography, unified by an enduring interest in light as both a generative and destructive force. He is best known for his dye-on-canvas works, created by exposing stenciled canvases to the elements over extended periods, allowing the sun, wind, and dust to inscribe the surface. These works treat the landscape as an open-air darkroom and embody a slow, meditative mode of making. His Polaroid practice carries forward this same sensitivity to time, entropy, and atmosphere, offering a more immediate, but no less contemplative, record of transformation.

Shake’s use of the Polaroid camera--a hallmark of Cold War-era consumer culture--underscores his interest in capturing moments on the brink of disappearance. The medium’s tactile immediacy and physical imperfections echo the very qualities of the signs and structures he documents. These photographs are not just images of buildings; they are quiet records of a city in flux, distilling the tensions between progress and decay, memory and forgetting. Suspended in the moment before they vanish, they remind us that even the most ordinary fragments of the built environment carry the weight of history.

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 Nino Mier Gallery, Brussels; Galerie Timonier, New York; Rogers Office, Los Angeles; and Brant/Timonier, Palm Beach, FL; among others.