Nate Kraemer is a visual artist born and raised in Calgary, Alberta. She moved to Victoria, British Columbia to study visual arts at the University of Victoria in 2022 where she intends to graduate from in the spring of 2026. In her childhood, she frequented rodeos such as the Calgary Stampede and the neighbouring Olds Rodeo which heavily inform her current practice, exploring themes surrounding nostalgia and family. Also raised Roman Catholic, nuanced conversations balancing rejection and gratitude often surface in her work, punctuating larger conversations around queerness and identity. Her recent practice has been influenced by the passing of her best friend in 2024, bringing extreme dichotomy between themes of grief and joy into her body of work. Operating under an assumption that there are guaranteed common human experiences such as love and death, Nate often brings multiple experiences together with common underpinnings to address within a piece. This act of finding through lines comes with the hope of making the work universally relatable while preserving the deeply personal elements. In 2025, Nate received a 6-week exhibition window in Habit Coffee’s Chinatown location where she hosted an opening and sold both originals and prints. Recently, she has participated in multiple group shows at the University of Victoria in the Audain Gallery.
My body of work primarily involves oil paint, though on occasion includes sculptural works of wood, metal, and textiles. My paintings and sculptures are thematically focused on childhood, nostalgia, grief, and identity through a lens of text work combined with western, “cowboy” iconography. The juxtaposition of the two, sometimes forced together, allows me to explore contradictions within the selected themes. When standing alone, my text works aim to achieve anti-meaning, absurdism, or eliminate meaning altogether. Across all my paintings, I enjoy employing a “bait-and-switch” tactic, drawing viewers in with iconography and louder graphic elements, then using the attention to address a deeper personal context. My older sculptural works tend to be explorations of childhood and nostalgia, where I create large representations of everyday objects, such as soothers (The World is your Binky) and model planes (Nosedive).
