Lucas Michael
UB ART GALLERIES
Installed in pairs across the exhibition’s two sites, the six unstretched canvases that constitute Lucas Michael’s Nomadic Paintings series hover between the material and the optical. They act as punctuation marks in each space, signal to one another like beacons across venues, and ultimately draw an open-ended sentence through the exhibition. Floating against walls, they interject as much as they bind.
Formally and conceptually referencing the Rorschach test, the works deploy the ink blot to subvert the codification of image and language. In this, the artist furthers their longstanding investigation of the ways in which official discourses—whether visual or textual—dissect and disempower marginalized populations.
A colorful cell-like circle levitates at the center of each work, invoking one of the body’s chakras. With their multi-scalar imagery and their pluri-directional energy, these works shuffle viewers back and forth between embodied and mental experiences, sensations internal and external as well as individual, social, spiritual, and political arenas. They offer a meditation on the individual’s physiobiological condition, the state of our shared environment, and the beyond. A cell, a body; a body, a landscape; a landscape, infinity; infinity, a cell.
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Argentina, Lucas Michael currently lives and works in New York City. Co-founder of Artist Curated Projects in Los Angeles, his practice spans video, photography, drawing, sculpture and installation. Michael’s work explores different facets of gender, sexuality, the division and multiplicity of the self, the role of the viewer in the blurring between the public and the private in the experience of art, and the written word as generative material for code and mark-making, while placing pressure on the integrity of the art object. His work has been exhibited at Leslie Lohman Museum, Apexart, and White Columns in New York City; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Bahia Blanca, Argentina; S.M.A.K. Museum, Gent, Belgium; performed at the Hammer Museum and screened at Getty Center in Los Angeles.
Lucas Michael
UB ART GALLERIES
Installed in pairs across the exhibition’s two sites, the six unstretched canvases that constitute Lucas Michael’s Nomadic Paintings series hover between the material and the optical. They act as punctuation marks in each space, signal to one another like beacons across venues, and ultimately draw an open-ended sentence through the exhibition. Floating against walls, they interject as much as they bind.
Formally and conceptually referencing the Rorschach test, the works deploy the ink blot to subvert the codification of image and language. In this, the artist furthers their longstanding investigation of the ways in which official discourses—whether visual or textual—dissect and disempower marginalized populations.
A colorful cell-like circle levitates at the center of each work, invoking one of the body’s chakras. With their multi-scalar imagery and their pluri-directional energy, these works shuffle viewers back and forth between embodied and mental experiences, sensations internal and external as well as individual, social, spiritual, and political arenas. They offer a meditation on the individual’s physiobiological condition, the state of our shared environment, and the beyond. A cell, a body; a body, a landscape; a landscape, infinity; infinity, a cell.
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Argentina, Lucas Michael currently lives and works in New York City. Co-founder of Artist Curated Projects in Los Angeles, his practice spans video, photography, drawing, sculpture and installation. Michael’s work explores different facets of gender, sexuality, the division and multiplicity of the self, the role of the viewer in the blurring between the public and the private in the experience of art, and the written word as generative material for code and mark-making, while placing pressure on the integrity of the art object. His work has been exhibited at Leslie Lohman Museum, Apexart, and White Columns in New York City; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Bahia Blanca, Argentina; S.M.A.K. Museum, Gent, Belgium; performed at the Hammer Museum and screened at Getty Center in Los Angeles.