Michelle Hailey
Above: Other People's Sunsets, 2008
New York-based Michelle Hailey combines painting and collage, often juxtaposing disparate elements with a mysterious effect. Hailey received her MFA from Hunter College in New York and her Bachelors in Painting from University of California Los Angeles. She has participated in many shows in New York, London, Amherst, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, in such venues as Artists Space, NY, Jack Tilton Gallery, NY, Bowery Gallery, NY. She is the recipient of several grants and awards for her work, including the Graf Travel Grant for research in Iceland, the Artists Space Webspace Artist of the Month, and the UCLA Art Department Project Grant, among others.
Statement
My work is motivated by my disconnected experience of nature and a failure to identify with a specific place as a home or inherent to my identity. These paintings describe a battle between the feelings of comfortably belonging and isolating loneliness. Through the combination of landscape images and still life objects in my paintings, I investigate how one's connection to a place is embodied in a collection of objects as mementos and how the dividing line between the man-made and natural world can be less defined. Through a collage process, varied handling of texture and spatial relationships, along with the pairing of direct and non-direct ways of experiencing a place, these paintings become constructs of conflict. The narratives of these paintings often describe different manifestations of a relationship with nature: plein-air landscape painting, travel photographs and postcards, memory of a place, and painting images in a studio. Fluctuating through different levels of disclosure and removal I attempt to question the given romanticized structure of landscape painting and the viewer's assumptions about accessibility, longing, desire, and sentimentality while presenting fractured narratives of personal memories, psychological spaces, playful jokes and imagined landscapes.
Much of the emotional content of the work is rooted in a desire to reconnect with California, as the place I used to call home, from my current viewpoint in New York. I often question the meaning of leaving such a seemingly paradisiacal place for a place such as New York, with its lifestyle where it is easy to compartmentalize the connection of nature, sex, work and leisure. However, much of the longing that I feel for California is created and reinforced by a powerful mythology, which exaggerates the romantic notion of conquering the land, while developing an intimate connectedness to nature. Traditionally, American landscape art has carried contradictory themes: the idealization of nature concurrent with industrialization; and confidence in an inevitable future with a selective memory of the past. I have felt the sense of homelessness and loneliness that comes from longing for a place that has become idealized and romanticized.
Through referencing the seemingly familiar, it is my aim to speak of a contemporary human experience of the world that acts as a summation of events; a fragmented sense of belonging that is situated tenuously between the historical, personal memory and the present. I've found that this fractured temporality can be best represented through a collaged sensibility, where the construction of the picture reveals its material edges, so that representations of the real and the ideal can formally coexist within one picture. By creating a formal dialectic between the illustrative, abstracted, collaged photographic and rendered detail I direct the viewer through a series of events. Together these varied elements of landscape, figures, and still life objects create a painting that, in its indirectness, is not a sincere investigation (plein air painting) or generalized abstraction, but remains in an open-ended state that allows for poetic visual connections.