Michael Gunn is a Providence based artist and educator originally from rural northwestern Pennsylvania. Often working between various drawing, painting, printmaking, and sculpture methods simultaneously, his practice is in a constant state of transition not dissimilar to his subjects. Each piece is built from a collection of studio fragments used as reference—cyanotype plant negatives, figurative studies, stream of consciousness drawings, flower bouquets, found photographs, material fragments, appropriated color palettes, or whatever else finds its way into the windowsills and corners of the studio. Care and desire for their interconnectedness is practiced and represented through fingertip wiped or superimposed indexical marks. Illuminated illusions and images come up from the inside of the subjects to arrive at spatially and materially skewed images by exposing previous layers of paint. Psychic spaces, still lives, and bodies with heightened color, strong geometric compositional style, and queered transcendental iconography are set into action inspired by passages from his diaries and poems detailing his relationship to the Allegheny river. Growing up exploring the tributaries and forests just beyond its banks, the strip mines, iron furnaces, and abandoned industries are seen slowly dissolving and eroding back into the landscape which reclaims them. These discoveries are rendered cloudy in ambiguous narratives that only partially reveal and pay tribute to sites of intimacy queer people utilize as they come of age in rural places when isolated from safe communities. Poetic relationships are formed between entangled subjects experiencing intimacy and hallucinatory contemplations that highlight communication with nonhuman subjects through collection, arrangement, display, and personification as a means to collapse material and social forms of hierarchy.

Michael recently graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Painting. He has just completed a fellowship at the RISD Museum with the Contemporary Curatorial department. He was a co-curator and exhibited work in an exhibition titled “Living Urn”, in Gelman Gallery, was included and won honorable mention in the PAC “College Biennial”, and has been included in various group shows during his undergrad. In 2023, He completed a Residency with the Royal Drawing School at Dumfries House in Scotland, UK, and is now included in the Prince’s Foundation Collection. He currently works at ODD-KIN as Gallery Assistant and at School One as an Adjunct Drawing Teacher.