Nicolas Shake’s practice is grounded in close observation of his surroundings, capturing fragments of urban life with a heightened sensitivity to light, atmosphere, and time. He is best known for his sunbleached dye works on canvas, created by leaving dyed surfaces exposed to sun and weather for months, allowing the elements to gradually develop and alter the image. Working also in photography, he documents the evolving landscape of Los Angeles through facades, billboards, and signage- fleeting emblems of the city’s visual identity. These instant photographs, marked by color shifts and material imperfections, form an archive of urban transience and underscore the tension between permanence and decay.

Across media, Shake treats light as both destructive and generative, transforming the landscape into an open-air darkroom. Drawing on the sun-bleached remnants of desert materials and the faded optimism of mid-century American mass culture, he revisits utopian imagery to question where its promise unraveled. His work moves between Minimalism, Abstraction, and Conceptualism, grounded in a distinctly Californian sensibility.