Wild Olympia - Solo Exhibition featuring Michael Paul Miller

Description

The Port Angeles Fine Art Center's is excited to announce their next exhibition, titled Wild Olympia, a solo exhibition featuring the works of Michael Paul Miller. The opening reception will be on May 19th from 5-7pm. Miller's work will be in the gallery until June 8th. “Wild Olympia” is reference to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, which includes the wilderness spaces of Olympic National Park. It is also a subtle nod to art history and to those who live unrestrained. Michael Paul Miller’s interest in the preservation of external and internal wilderness spaces is portrayed through depictions of iconic places of Olympic National Park, which borrow from the classical Western aesthetic style of art and are coupled with dynamic negative space drawings. The harmonious circular or square shaped paintings are interrupted by automatic drawing responses that break up the traditional landscape imagery and explore a reactionary line between subconscious and conscious thought. While the unpainted spaces challenge the pictorial, they reveal the subsurface support material of whence they came and create access to the void. The combination of different types of wild imagery may address multiple contemporary and age-old concerns with the foremost being nature, violence, sex, and death. The titles of the artworks support these ideas with either double or triple entendres. As with the wild places they reference, these paintings have teeth. They can seduce and strike. From mountains to mega-quakes, from sea-stacks to tsunamis, from rainforest to deluge, and from fir to fur, these timeless and enduring relationships suggest that the beauty and power of the Northwest wilderness may persist even though it may come with great loss. The depicted landscapes are empty of any zoomorphic forms. It’s a subtle reference to the Anthropocene, the next mass extinction on Earth. Gallery Hours at the PAFAC: Thursday - Sunday 11am - 5pm *Note, the gallery will open on 5/19 at 5pm.