Livin' on the Schiz 69 (Oaktown Brown) Painting

email: The focus of my practice explores balance through illusion and deception, creating relationships of image-based representation to tangible, sculptural objects. Often the perceptual and physical space of painting collides through the use of non-traditional materials and interruption of the painted plane. Image becomes object and vice-versa. The image is now digested by the masses not as a photo of something else, but as an entity all to itself. The images produced, and now disseminated across endless technological landscapes, have found a life of their own; in turn putting in to question the current authority in which the object itself holds. The digestible still life, botanicals, portraits, pottery and carpentry are so familiar that their very existence is wallpaper worthy. Yet, the relationship of skin with bones transgresses the consumable surface. The isolated image or object then comes further to life with its illusion. An illusion that is less about its pure opticality and more of a reference to reality versus its observed reality. As if one were to view the world through a piece of saran wrap. In 2014, Mike received a Masters of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where for two years he was a Helen Russell Memorial Scholar. Upon completion of his graduate studies, he received a Municipal Art League Fellowship from the city of Chicago. Mike has been the subject of features in Juxtapoz Magazine, New American Paintings, Studio Visit Magazine and with Saatchi Art. His work has been exhibited in numerous galleries in the United States including the Erin Cluley Gallery in Dallas, Copro Gallery in Los Angeles and various galleries in Chicago, San Francisco and Minneapolis. His work appears in many collections, including the Jiminez-Colon Collection.