in Conversation: With Nathan Storey 4.8.

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Curator, Rory Fitzgerald Bledsoe, was in conversation with ARCHIVE FEVER DREAM artist, Nathan Storey, 4/8/2025.

Nathan Storey is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, writer, educator, and facilitator based in Boulder, Colorado. His work traces the relationship between printed matter and queer desire, memory, and loss. Storey’s work has been supported by ICA San Diego, 80WSE New York, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and galleries internationally. He has attended the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown; Anderson Ranch Art Center, Snowmass; and the Prattsville Art Center; Catskills. Storey’s work has been featured in MATTE Editions, Queer Aesthetics Journal, HereIn Journal, and the San Diego Union-Tribune. In 2019, he founded SUBLIMATION, an artist-run space supporting multidisciplinary exhibitions by underrepresented artists in New York's Lower East Side. In 2024, Storey established UNDERTOW, an artist-run press supporting queer artists’ printed matter and ephemera. He is a 2025 Queer|Art|Mentorship fellow working with Ken Gonzales-Day. Storey is the curator of the iterative exhibition, RUINS: PERFORMING QUEER HISTORY. He holds a BFA from NYU and an MFA from UC San Diego. Storey has taught at UC San Diego and Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design.

An excerpt from the curator’s text on Nathan Storey:

Some of the artists fabricate directly from archival material, Nathan Storey’s print “Looking” is sourced from “The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts”, an American gay pornography zine from the 70s in which men would anonymously submit recollections of male-to-male encounters. Storey Photographs these images and makes alive what would likely be forgotten, and provokes us to listen (see Tina Campt’s Listening to Images). Did he find love? Did he survive? Storey’s “Midnight Sun” and “Lost Highway” are made from quer NYC nightclub flyers in the 80s, during the heart of the AIDS crisis - there is an aura to these images. Storey’s undulating strobic text piece is a remixed fragment from David Wajnarowicz’s memoir, the multi-media artist who died of AIDS in 1992. Storey’s works are simultaneously a repository of trauma and transfiguration .

Some questions asked:

Can you talk more about the work you have in this show and how it fits into your larger practice?

What is it about the archive that you are so drawn to? What kind of archives are important to you?

What is your relationship to process and what is this process? Are there particular artists who have influenced your work materially?

In terms of process, I want to talk about your hyphenated role as an artist-curator. How do these relate for you?

Are there any upcoming projects that you are excited about? Would you like to talk a bit more about the new queer printed matter art press you started almost a year ago, UNDERTOW?