Nils Hammerand is a contemporary painter born in 1998 in Corinth, NY working on the border between bodies. His paintings are undeniably rooted in rage and eroticism, unveiling complex, misunderstood thoughts on the body through basic primordial shapes. Based on both trans and cis bodies he uses the foundational elements, primarily shape and color, of painting that shimmer from either end of the gender spectrum to illuminate a body’s transmutable capabilities. He paints the real and unreal, the here and the never present, reality that we all exist between.

Recently, his works have turned away from delicately layered, transparent surfaces to a rougher, more opaque application of paint. In doing so he strips back to the essentials of shape, color, and content in order to focus on the subject's ability to shift in the eye of each viewer. Often it is not possible to discern how many figures are present in a composition further obfuscating the distance between bodies and sex. Hammerand also utilizes the very edge of paintings to hold calculated doses of color that inform how the entire painting is understood. This tactic works to balance the palette as well as thematically using the fringe to understand perceived unchangeable forms.

Most people understand sex as two distinct, immutable types of bodies that never once waver. Male and female are understood in terms of what is present and what is absent from the other. Bodies that fall outside of this binary evoke a series of automatic responses including revulsion, arousal, as well as confusion. There is a need to classify those who remain unknowable to cis-people while ignoring the shared basis of our bodies. Our bodies are capable of reading the same scripts, actualizing fantasies thought to be only that. Fear can manifest from the realization of the control you possess over your body. However, the much less discussed fear is of the see-through fascia barring each of us from seeing the other entirely. We are as similar as muscles are close, fibers roving over each other to produce movement. The sameness is what drives our desire to see the differences.