Oliver Michaels - Fill - Content-Aware

April 25 – June 19, 2015
Opening Reception: April 25th, 5-7pm

Show Press Release

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present its third solo exhibition with Oliver Michaels: “Fill: Content-Aware.” This exhibition brings together three bodies of the artist’s photographic work and three videos. Michaels’ photographs are created through an extensive process of photographing, archiving and manipulating bits of buildings and materials, producing a final result that blurs the demarcation between painting, sculpture and photography. Referring back to art historical predecessors including the Bechers, Fischlii and Weiss, Stephen Shore and Gordon Matta-Clark, Michaels’ works reinvestigate traditional practices under the persuasion of digitization. “Composite Exteriors” is an ongoing series in which the artist photographs architectural elements and composites them together into a single structure. The viewer encounters images dually imagined and real of bricolage buildings that can only exist within the framework of the photograph. “Incidental Composites” follows this same concept, focusing on minimalist spatial details such as corners, sidewalks, and passageways. Michaels offers viewers the opportunity to appreciate form and space as it is rearticulated through photography on a more intimate scale. “Clay Composites” juxtaposes sculpting by hand with “sculpting” in Photoshop. Beginning with the traditional creative springboard of a block of clay, Michaels physically molds and adorns it, then digitally builds a conglomerate formal work. The result of his laborious process is deftly contradictory as the artist manages to produce works that seem both traditional and oddly unfamiliar. The exhibition’s video works employ multiple split-screen editing techniques, each dealing with space, material, humor, and banality. “Tube Balloon Thing” shows a self-functioning machine spitting out everyday objects. “A Journey Between Two Fixed Points” enters and exits public and private space, giving viewers fragments of various people’s lives. “Rotating Sculpture” makes its debut in this exhibition and brings together materials that elicit a sense of place through incongruous form. Oliver Michaels is a graduate of Central Saint Martins School of Art in London. He has exhibited at P.S.1, New York, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam, Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris, and Tate Britain, London. His works belong to many permanent collections including MOMA, New York, Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama, and Krefelder Kunstmuseen, Germany. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn.