Nelly Is Looking for Closure is an ongoing artistic research project that examines perception as a system that continuously seeks coherence, completion, and legibility, while never fully achieving them. The project departs from the idea that images naturally resolve into stable meanings, and instead stages situations in which perceptual organization remains active but unsettled.
At the center of the project is a recurring image fragment of a woman, referred to as Nelly. This image appears across different works and configurations, combined with other photographic material, spatial arrangements, and temporal structures. Rather than functioning as a subject or character, Nelly operates as a constant within a shifting perceptual field. Through repetition, fragmentation, and recombination, the image becomes a site onto which expectations of closure are repeatedly projected and withheld.
The project works across collage, printed images, video, and installation. Images are combined or intervened in through cropping, masking, displacement, and reproduction, often passing through multiple stages of scanning and reprinting. These processes introduce distance, mediation, and temporal friction, allowing perceptual coherence to emerge without stabilizing. Bodies, objects, landscapes, and familiar situations are approached not for what they represent, but for the perceptual scripts they activate.
Individual works within the project are titled as ongoing tests and retain this status even when presented publicly. Each work functions as a completed object while remaining part of an open system in which perception continues to operate. Closure is not denied, but continuously deferred.
Rather than proposing interpretations or narratives, Nelly Is Looking for Closure foregrounds the conditions under which seeing takes place. The project makes perceptible how attention organizes images over time, and how meaning emerges not through resolution, but through sustained engagement with what remains incomplete.
The project began in 2026 and is currently in its first stage of iteration, focusing on testing perceptual conditions across image, material, and spatial presentation.
