UW grad student's show explores nature of friendships past

Peter Bonde Becker Nelson is tall, with striking blue eyes.

He's 27 and married.

He's a second-year photography and video graduate student at the University of Washington who debuted his work locally in three shows this month.

That's what Seattle knows about him.

Like all Seattle transplants, Nelson has a history of experiences that's private, a lifetime's worth of formative friendships that current friends know little about. So what of the events from his past? Specifically, so what of the people who shared and shaped his life when the dreams he's enacting now were just forming?

Nelson's second solo show, through October at Gallery4Culture, lets visitors take a listen to five of his "Former Best Friends Forever."

Each friend is represented through an installation or video with accompanying audio, culled from hours of interviews Nelson gathered while visiting his small Minnesota hometown. Some guys he's been in touch with off and on throughout life; others he just knew for a short time, such as the duration of middle school.

Now the men are teachers, farmers and corporate workers. The anecdotes they share are a window to all the time in between.

"These guys were all quite different from each other and quite different from me, but at one point there was this incredibly tight bond," says Nelson.

The installation's centerpiece is a 1989 Chevy Tahoe, the same truck Nelson's lifelong friend John owned in high school. To hear what John has to say — and it's not the most flattering remembrance — you have to climb inside.

"To me, it's kind of a loaded object, because people have intense conversations in cars," says Nelson, likening them to a modern confessional. He was interested in why John held on to memories of being mistreated by him, when he often remembered events and situations differently.

In recent books like Jenny Offill and Elissa Chappell's "The Friend Who Got Away," women have begun to acknowledge the mixed emotions, and sometimes the break-up-worthy pain, that follow a friendship's end.

In art and pop culture, men may express those feelings even less frequently. While Nelson doesn't show significant pain in losing his former BFFs, they weigh heavily on his mind. And he says they were all a little skeptical about being interviewed for art.

While you're at the Tashiro Kaplan building that houses 4Culture, head to SOIL to view Nelson's 2008 digital video, "On Dying." SOIL's Chris Engman chose it for the gallery's invitational this month.

In the 10-minute video, young male and female actors voice monologues by older people on the topic of death.

By broadcasting their fascinating viewpoints and sometimes broken, world-weary voices through fresh faces, Nelson acts like a DJ, orchestrating a deeper emotion than you'd expect from the mash-up.

"To make a piece about dying is in itself a courageous thing, because the fact of death is mostly avoided in public discourse," says Engman.

"I find Peter's work to be direct, honest and powerful. He works with ideas that he genuinely cares about on both the theoretical and the personal level."