Mike Carney

Region: Midwest

Website: http://www.artbycarney.com

City / State: Minneapolis, MN

I explore balance through illusion and deception, creating relationships between image-based representation and tangible, sculptural objects. Often the perceptual and physical spaces of painting collide through my use of nontraditional materials and the interruption of the painted plane. Image becomes object and vice versa.

The image is now digested by the masses not as a photo of something else, but as an entity itself. The images produced and now disseminated across endless technological landscapes have found a life of their own, putting into question the authority of the object itself. Digestible still lifes, botanicals, portraits, and carpentry are so familiar as to be wallpaper-worthy. Yet the relationship of skin to bones transgresses the consumable surface. The isolated image or object comes further to life through its illusion. An illusion that is less about opticality, and more about the notion of reality versus observed surreality. As if one were to view the world through Saran wrap.