Daily Featured Artwork: Michèle Colburn’s “Let Them Eat Cake”
Event Date and Time: May 5, 2020 2:00 pm
Cost: $
Location:
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Michèle Colburn
Let Them Eat Cake
Mixed media, acrylic, military trip wire spools, ceramics, and bullet casings
18″ x 20″
“My work is socio-political and influenced by our 18-year involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan and by growing up during the Vietnam War. I am a multi-disciplinary artist with a strong interest in materiality and continue to produce object-based works, with forays into performance and endurance-based projects. I have long been interested in divers materials and an artist who creates sculpture, installation, and two dimensional works with forays into video and public endurance performance, but most recently I have turned to larger two-dimensional works on paper.
These works include the use of gunpowder, and I began in 2015 using a variety of materials associated with gun violence or war. There was experimentation involving gunpowder including processes of evaporation and imprinting as well as using shot paper with tears and burn marks from bullets. It was important to experiment with the application of gunpowder and its reaction with water colors. By 2018, works were infused with more color and energy.
The emphasis I place on materiality is integral to the work and I often relinquish control and allow process to dominate outcomes as a facilitator, but as the work unfolds more decisions are made and control returns.These materials are loaded with symbolism and associations, but my process involves rendering these materials in their raw form impotent. They are naturally associated directly with war and domestic violence, but in my work they evolve into something else more aesthetic.
My work has been referred to as seductive in its beauty and the materials that are fraught with terrible associations are transformed and carry a message or a reminder, or provoke thought and questioning in the viewer. These works can evoke many things. Perhaps a reminder of a global landscape man has created and that impacts us all, or humanity’s struggle and conflict, or even the confluence of conflict and environmental shifts and the violence that is Climate Change.” -Michèle Colburn
This piece is from our latest exhibition, Conversations 2020