Michael Kareken
Kareken_HouseandUniverseII.jpg

Shifting Visions / 2022-2024

This series of watercolor monotypes was produced in collaboration with the Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Minneapolis. The work focuses on the landscape where I grew up in the Pacific Northwest.  The monotypes were made by painting with watercolor on a thin polyester plate which was then transferred to a sheet of paper on the press.  I used both additive and subtractive processes to make the images, putting down washes and marks that were allowed to dry before being lifted and revised by re-wetting the plate.

Information about the series is available from The Highpoint Center for Printmaking.

 

Shifting Visions / 2022-2024

House and Universe II, conte on duralar, 20.5” x 28.5”

Shifting Visions is a series of drawings and paintings depicting overlapping and fragmented interior and exterior spaces. The work was inspired by the experience of looking out of a neighbor’s window one evening at dusk. As the sun faded, the reflections of the lighted interior began to obscure and fragment the darker scene outside - walls dissolved into backyards, a staircase led to the treetops, and cars parked themselves on top of furniture. In that moment the ordinary neighborhood street and comfortable domestic space transformed into a disorienting, unfamiliar world. The experience resonated with me because of recent life changes; the complex, overlapping spaces I saw in the nighttime reflections seem to embody the unsettled, evolving sense of self I was grappling with.

People are absent from the work, although their presence is implied in the parked cars, porch lights, and dining room tables. The focus is on the space itself and the movements, rhythms and transitions between the overlapping scenes and objects. Based on observations of specific places, the images are inventions that often combine multiple locations, points of view, seasons, and times of day. These elements are woven together in a way that is intended to feel at once cohesive and disjointed. I used what I observed in the window reflections as a guide, blurring edges to connect near and far, dissolving forms into shadows, establishing multiple light sources to create shifting focal points within the compositions. 

The individual works developed through many successive stages as imagery was built up, removed, and then built up again. The drawings have a surface patina of marks and tones that is the result of the repeated erasure and re-drawing. In the gouache paintings, my attempts to overpaint areas were often imperfect, allowing parts of the previous image to leak through the new paint layer. The repeated revisions and restatements mirror the experience of losing and regaining a memory, of forgetting and recalling that is at the heart of the work.