Attends the Rhode Island School of Design's Painting BFA
Began working in rural Northwest Pennsylvania
Michael's works emphasize residual meditations present in his relationship to the river he grew up next to for his entire life, the Allegheny river, as a site and exploration of fantasy and the origins of intimacy practiced between gay men in rural parts of the United States. His practice intends to extract hidden and undeniable connection between divinity, nature, and the queer body through enacting responses that respond to a desire for their unification. The work often emphasizes the movement and qualities of illumination, the fingertip sized touch, and multiple states of material reality through sensitive layering processes:
“In reflection of my species, which fumbles to act upon the realities of collapse in our natural world due to escape into digital modes of distraction—against a backdrop of clouded political violence—my work begins in the natural world: the river, the field, and images archived on shared cross country hiking trips. Nature is forced to cope with chemical runoff, abandoned architecture, and the remnants of extractive histories hidden deep within rural America. It is here that collapsing and asserting the bodies as inseparable from nature, against the desires of the post-modern biopolitical force, is the mechanism to ask for new ways of making conscious the potential of daydreaming and feeling empathy. The rural landscape conceals and holds fringe sexual identities safe against the backdrop of their turbulent and oppressive public discourses. Often, assimilation and surveillance force a reimagining of environment and self entirely, producing new logic in response to alienation. Its legibility is often unresolved. These deep pains that linger in the work resolve themselves for me at this sight of surrealist inquiry.
Meaning within my work comes from its mimicry of light, of liquid, of air, or between multiple states of matter and their uncertainty in feeling fixed. Care is practiced through touch; wiped marks and sensitive illusions captured in the materiality of the subjects are done with fingertips. This allows me to allude and use poetics for building new focal points in images of the body experiencing intimacy as a way of being sensitive to the importance and impact of this type of vulnerability. I’m joining a movement to carve out an often contested category of figurative art which synthesizes worlds with heightened color, strong geometric compositional style, and transcendental sympathies that complicate historic narrative forms with new perspectives on reality's materialization.”