Cameron Michel

"CALANDRA" Abstract Mixed media painting 48" x 96" inch by Cameron Michel

2021

Michel has been an apprentice to established artists Matthew Barney (NY), Sterling Ruby (LA), and The Haas Brothers (LA). He co-produced Anti-Rabbit Art (2006), an installation created for the Multispecies Salon Exhibit (2010) in New Orleans. He also co-founded the Live With Animals Gallery (est. 2008) in Brooklyn and is a member of the renowned post-punk synth band Sextile. A self-taught artist, Michel is fascinated with the collective consciousness and believes the “universe knows more than we do”. The conversations generated between manipulated shapes and unrecognizable imagery echo a lost world. Within these language landscapes of never-existed realms lives ethereal life-forms that seem to drift into the galaxy. Between the omnipotent cosmos and the paintings’ surfaces lies a familiar and questionable comfort that hits hard. Michel is an enigmatic punk, an outsider caught in the inside. He makes the intentional look anything but and says “everything you make is a sketch for the next thing”. He’s a craftsman with an affinity for raw concepts and impermanence. His abstracted arrangements are intimately drafted without defined strategy. Predetermination defeats the element of discovery and overthrows the power of the experience. Michel feels it then does it. This process of cutting and manipulating paper ephemera is a meditative instinct that seems a welcome remedy for an unwanted kind of dissonance. Artist CAMERON MICHEL (b. 1978, Atlanta, Georgia) currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.