For artist Nate Young, reality and truth are not always one and the same

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Nate Young is a Chicago-based artist who is best known for his exquisite work with wood. I think his work can best be called conceptually narrative. It is inspired by personal recollection, oral history, and family relics, among other things, but this story cannot be seen directly in Nate’s work. It’s more accurate to say that it can be felt, sensed, intuited. Recollection, an exhibition of Nate's newest work at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, is spare and ethereal. The objects in the show tell a story, about family and identity and memory, and they are also about myth and mysticism. You don’t see this work so much as feel it.