Michael Stevenson: Your Strengths Made You Stronger When You Were Younger

MICHAEL STEVENSON:

YOUR STRENGTHS MADE YOU STRONGER WHEN YOU WERE YOUNGER

Rosenberg Gallery

The main impetus behind the paintings in this exhibition stems from recent personal events. The paintings reflect these experiences—things hidden and then revealed, surprise at actions uncovered after not being known for multiple years, foundations crumbling and rebuilt.

The paintings are both metaphors for this sense of unsettling and unpredictability and responses to those events and that sense: the nearly recognizable forms, the sense of the possibility of narrative— that, with a little bit more information, they could be understood—the literal covering up, the glimpse of something hidden and ultimately indescribable.

The history of abstract painting is filled with arguments for its universality and its immediacy. The argument here is not based on those approaches, although they exist in all painting, abstract or not.

The argument here is that, ultimately, all painting, all art, is mute. Mute and unmoving until there is a decision to engage or walk away.

Engaging requires not so much a leap of faith, although that is there, but a willingness to act without precondition, without knowing the full story or needing to know it. This is the crux of these works—they are reflections of that need, the need to act without all the facts, without being able to decide on a rational basis because nothing is provided to do so. And as the viewer acts, so does the painting, and that action reflects the motivation to paint as well.

Do people live in a world of self-delusion, to a greater or lesser extent?

Does reality only come to bear when major events happen? Does that intrusion of reality, or events, strip the screen away, even temporarily?

Lout oud 2 acrylic on canvas on board 18” x 24”

Golden bough acrylic on canvas on board 16” x 20”

Aroma for bullfinches acrylic on canvas on board 18” x 24”

MICHAEL STEVENSON Michael Stevenson (Baltimore) works in paint, printmaking, music, and theater.

Currently his interests are the interaction of memory and experience. He studied art at Concordia University in Montreal, getting his B.F.A. in painting, as well as at the University of Quebec at Montreal and the Hochschule der Kunst in Berlin. While pursuing his B.F.A., he also started a post-hardcore band that toured North America and released several albums over several years.

He completed an M.F.A. in painting and printmaking at Arizona State University, in Tempe, Arizona. At the same time, he completed an M.A. in art history, focusing on native Mexican Indian manuscript illustration traditions over the period of the conquest. He was a recent recipient of the Pollock Krasner Award, received a full fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center, and was an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts. He runs a tri-yearly salon, exhibiting artist work and presenting performances in an intimate setting. He has lived and worked in Paris, Berlin, and Los Angeles, among other places. His work can be found in public and private collections in North America and Europe.

FEBRUARY 24 – APRIL 9

Rosenberg Gallery

Please note the gallery will be closed March 13 -19 for Goucher’s spring break.

GALLERY HOURS 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. | Monday – Friday 410-337-6477

www.goucher.edu/rosenberg

COVER IMAGE: Plaintive, plaintive, acrylic on canvas on board, 16” x 20”

DIRECTIONS Baltimore Beltway, I-695, to exit 27A. Make first left onto campus.

The exhibit is free and open to the public.

The Rosenberg Gallery program is funded with the assistance of grants from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the state of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Baltimore County Commission on the Arts and Sciences.

17413-5756 01/17

ARTIST RECEPTION:

Tuesday, March 7, 2017 6-8 p.m.