Beauty and Risk: Loosening and Liberating Through Body, Earth, and Image

 

"You don’t have any interest in shooting with other bodies do you?? How about if it was naked in a nest like sculpture (that I could use help assembling) on September 16th?"

This is an Instagram DM I got from photographer/choreographer Blake Nellis last month. My response? "Yup, still interested."

Looking at Nellis’s images makes me want to be the subject inside them. Not in the way that the model’s body is coveted, but in the way that I want to be in that place with my own bare body — planted in the dirt, in the water, sprawled on the moss and the rock. I want to feel free like that, and I want to have fun like that. 

 

 

Nellis’s show Shallow Form: A Collection of Body, Water, and Myth is currently up at Spruce, a salon nestled in the Bryn Mawr neighborhood of South Minneapolis. Bethanne Turnbull, the owner, highlights four artists a year on the walls of the salon, and with this show Nellis is displaying new work alongside pieces from his 2016 collection of Skin.Rock.Bone. He captures usually-nude bodies placed in the elements. Whether there is only one body in frame or multiple (he’s photographed up to 24 at a time), Nellis explores where softness and hardness settle in the scene and what textures lay between. Each work is occupied by a reverence to nature, to body, and to the meditated mystery that merges the two. “Everybody looks good naked” is an idea that Nellis preaches with his work. 

Writing for MPLSART, I visit galleries around the metro, and often they can be somewhat hollow spaces with just one or two visitors in them at a time, unless it’s the opening reception where a crowd is gathered. Understandably, the room shouldn’t detract or distract from the art that will be exhibited there. But Nellis’s work being on display in a hair salon — a place where people go to have their physical selves tended to and have nothing to do but look at the walls, their phone, or last month’s issue of People magazine — provides a unique opportunity. 

 

 

Nellis’s mom was a lab photographer, so he knew the darkroom and was shooting on film by age ten. Being the rural kid he was, he primarily photographed railroads, flowers, and farms. After getting injured in college and unable to continue playing baseball, Nellis joined a class that taught contact improvisation (CI), a movement research based art sport created in the 1970s, grounded in momentum and relationship to gravity and other people. With CI, he learned to trust instead of control impulses of attraction and repulsion, moving toward what felt good in a movement practice. This space of consent and curiosity challenged Nellis’s lingering body insecurities, rules, frustrations, and religious expectations. While his views of the body were shifting, and as he began to document himself in the nude, “photography was a way to look at it and allow time to reflect,” he says, “asking does this match the experience I’m having? Because I feel so good in my body right now but then when I look at the picture I’m like ‘agh, is that porn?’” With Nellis’s combined personal inquiry and his skill photographing the moving body, he’s amassed hundreds of images that ask similar questions, exploring whether it’s okay to be seen, and okay to be beautiful.

Leading up to the nest build and shoot, I was excited. Some shame and awkwardness ensued the morning of while explaining to my roommate that I was off to build a giant nest in a public park and lay naked in it with strangers. Then some nervousness crept in once on site at Silverwood Park, as I anticipated undressing and predicted how my body might look different from others’. Ten minutes after stripping however, a new normal of nudity started to form. Thirty minutes in, I felt comfort and enjoyment in sharing this vulnerable mode of creativity with the surrounding group of models/dancers. Any remaining tensions around the event were released once we cry-laughed about the bugs that were crawling up all of our butt cracks. I mean come on, when does that ever happen? Nellis was well-practiced at coaching and directing this type of group shoot. He effortlessly gave cues when needed, and simultaneously allowed room for creative choice from the participants. 

 

 

During a shoot, Nellis gives his models (who are often dancers) a score, a movement exercise, a task for them to ground in while he takes their photos. While seated across the picnic table during our interview, Nellis explains, “If I say here, put your hand in my hand, what I’m really looking for is what you're going to do everywhere else because I know you're going to put your hand there. Then I can relax and put my attention into the kids playing back there, the way the light is shining here, and then I start to build that muscle for multitasking awareness.” As a teacher and choreographer, Nellis has become acutely aware of his peers’ comfort levels, he picks up on nuanced body language and signs that communicate what direction is needed from him. So much of his artistry is about the process, not the product — it's about creating a sense of ease, safety, relatability, and joy during the shoot. Nellis helps others access expression, comfort, authenticity and creative play, and being naked in nature is his foundation for that experience. “Dance is almost always like that”, says Nellis, there is a temporary feeling of connection bound together by physicality. 

Nellis has mentioned that he “sees the moment before it happens” while photographing movement. I ask him what he means by that, and he says, “Another way I’ve described it to myself is ‘the skill of virtuosic surprise,’ and I’ve definitely developed it through dance. Theater performance, music, photography — they all have these similar qualities, and for me I’m looking for <Nellis gasps, inhaling sharply> the breath in, the held breath, the jump, the penultimate moment, the moment before that last chord.” Nellis tries to keep people moving while photographing them, because there is a waiting, a sense of timing and surprise that he tries to predict and keep pace with. “There doesn't need to always be a slow-meditated pose, I really like hair in the face and I like wind and I like falling and I like in-betweenness, that’s something I’m always looking for.”

As I experienced with the nest photoshoot, Nellis’s style is quite collaborative. Once there were only three of us “birds” remaining in the sculpture, Nellis noted that he felt satisfied with what we’d already captured in the shoot, so everything from then on out was welcomed to be weird. One of the participants had brought a literal bag of bones, and another who works at a floral shop brought flowers saved from the compost. From that point we went full play mode, and shit did get pretty weird. 

 

 

“I don’t conceive of all the ideas,” Nellis says. “That’s what some people think, is that the photographer has a good idea and then they document it.” Being a photographer who exists on both sides of the camera allows for him to relate to the models in a unique way, but also blur those lines and identities, sometimes having the models click the camera. Nellis will also add in other layers of poetry, as he calls it, whether that be smoke bombs, mirrors, textile, or in this case, flowers and bones. The participants influence how these objects and textures are related to, and that contributes layers to how the body is viewed. 

So is Nellis’s work too provocative? Too sexual? I guess you’ll have to find out for yourself. “Risk is definitely a theme, without trying to make taboo or risque work, not really. I'm trying to make gateway drugs to get every single person feeling good in their skin.” Nellis notes that a lot of art is made safely, and that oftentimes he reverts to what feels safe too, but that ultimately when he risks being wrong or incorrect, people follow their own sense of attraction, pleasure, and desire to his work. There is something recognizable there that is naturally captivating. Sidling the risk in each image is an unmistakable freedom, springing forth with lucidity — luring, maintaining, releasing. ◼︎ 

 

Blake Nellis with his work at Spruce. Photo by Bill Cameron.

 

Shallow Form: A Collection of Body, Water, and Myth is on view now at Spruce Salon, with a reception planned for Saturday, December 7, 5 – 9pm. Spruce Salon is located at 404 Penn Ave S in Minneapolis.

To see more of Blake Nellis's work, visit the artist's website or follow him on Instagram @blakenellisphoto.

All images courtesy of the artist.