Michael Childress “Pictures of the Floating World”

“Pictures of the Floating World” is the translation of “Ukiyo-e,” which is a type of woodblock print made in Japan during the Edo period. Saturated colored skies were a staple feature of the times, which appears throughout Childress' oeuvre. Each painting is sequestered into sections, the upper area acts as the celestial while the lower section acts as the terrestrial. The body of work in this exhibition is a part of a larger extended series Childress started in 2020, which he refers to as Equivalents, after Alfred Steiglitz’s series of ethereal photographs of clouds. In 1922, these images pushed the representational medium into the realm of the abstract. Steiglitz’s technical advancements in creating fluid liminal skies are concurrent to Childress’ process, he obfuscates the forms and colors, which in turn creates a melding of scientific diagrams with otherworldly auras. Each of Childress' paintings stems from both our world and the unknown. The channeling of light, form, and color collide together forging multi-dimensional entities. These visual poetic motifs activate a vibration within the eye, as the viewer visually embeds themselves within the coalescing cataclysmic shapes the weight of gravity sets in and pushes the eye into a telluric current. The particles within the phantasmal ecosystems of color produce a perceptual ambiguity melding psychological interpretation with visually complex algorithms. Geometric color fields bleed into otherworldly landscapes, suggesting quantum systems beyond our immediate reality.

Press release and images via New Image Art Gallery, LA.