Nathan Rios

About me

Nathan Rios is a digital media artist from the Bay Area. His practice combines digital painting, animation, and sound which translate into projected installations. These visuals contain ambient light with themes of unspoken experience, hauntology, and the surreal. At a young age, he quickly grew accustomed to the arts and would later adopt a digital workflow after completing his art degree at San Jose State University.

Most of his visual inspiration stems from stargazing in his backyard as a child. One particular night he observed the brightly lit eyes of a nocturnal skunk illuminated from the light of a flashlight. Having this experience as a child allowed him to conjure creative visuals of light and its effect on the natural world.

In his work, light is a phenomenon that animates the living. It enters and exits bodies without reason, taking the shape of past, future, and present. He sees it as the perfect visual substance to grasp at the meaning of the world and to magnify the underlying details of space and the human experience.

my Work