Preservation and Decay

Chicago Weekly has just published a thorough story on my work thats worth a read:  Preservation and Decay: Xavier Nuez’s photographs find beauty in insects and inner cities by Keith Jamieson. 

My sorely neglected Glam Bug series has been on the back burner for some years, but they hang prominantly in my new studio and gallery. In the next few years, I’ll be devoting a great deal of time toward growing my population of heroic bugs. 

I miss working on this series; I miss sketching out and creating absurd histories for my dead creatures; I miss building the sets followed by the technical lighting challenges; and I miss the results: transforming a lowly bug – whose cousin I might have squashed at some time in history – into a star. Its absolutely ridiculous.  

Like my alleys, where I glorify shunned space, I have a need to glorify these shunned creatures. They are all at the bottom of the barrel, where they are reviled by society, and this is what makes me love them.

Rhodius: fallen hero of Troy