About

Nicole Foran (MFA, University of Cincinnati) is an artist based in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.  Her work investigates memory, identity, and psychogeography, the emotional effect place has on emotion. 

Geography of Substitution Artist Statement:

Geography of Substitution employs mixed media to construct a geography of substitution—places that stand in for other places I have lived, remembered, or imagined. I represent Iowa as Indiana, Florida as South Texas, Oklahoma as Saskatchewan. These are not attempts at deception so much as deliberate misalignments, where visual similarities—flat horizons, qualities of light, roadside architectures, vegetation—become convincing enough to hold the weight of memory, but never fully resolve into truth.

What interests me is the instability between recognition and dissonance. A landscape might feel familiar, yet small details resist certainty. These substitutions reveal how memory edits and compresses place, often prioritizing emotional coherence over factual accuracy. The work leans into a kind of false nostalgia—a longing for places that are already partial, displaced, or misremembered.

The project also responds to contemporary conditions of representation shaped by artificial intelligence and synthetic imagery. As AI-generated images increasingly blur distinctions between documentation and fabrication, these works examine how easily familiarity and authenticity can be constructed. Rather than hiding these slippages, I foreground them, using substitution to question the reliability of both memory and photographic evidence.

Drawing extends this process by slowing it down, allowing inaccuracies and distortions to accumulate through translation and repetition. Ultimately, the work is less about accurately depicting place and more about the unstable space between lived experience, memory, and mediated images.