Michael Mew grew up in the metropolis of Los Angeles when suburban living was altering American popular culture. In the neighborhoods where he was raised, alleys ran behind the houses to service trash pickups, affording him his first opportunities to collect discards and cast-offs.
After completing his degree, Mew's attraction to found objects turned him into a flea market disciple. He used his weekend treasure hunts to accumulate an impressive archive that became the source for assemblage art he created in the tradition of Joseph Cornell.
Mew's assemblage work contained the motifs that had influenced his art studies and his upbringing: Cornelian constructs of birds and star charts, ornate Victorian valentines mixing images of war and Catholic martyrdom with broken romance, and meditations on science and biology.
When Mew turned to collage work in 1994 he carried many of these themes into two-dimensional media, adding elements from 20th century popular culture like magazines pages, comic books, and advertisements.
In layering digital print technology with painting and rendering, he has synthesized a new formal approach that integrates a range of paired opposites: modern and postmodern sensibilities, low and high culture, play and critique.
Mew has wryly observed that his collection of images comes from 'an untidy place in my subconscious'. His ongoing interest in science, astronomy, world religion, and alchemy all play a part in the way his layered compositions fall together. Mew's fascination with surrealism, which originated during his college studies, led him to compose using loose associations that arise from his working process. Accumulating images, he trusts these subconscious connections to jell into lyrical, often pointed narratives with intricate and cohesive internal connections.
Artist Statement
In my recent collage work I've synthesized the historical and personal imagery that has shaped my life as an artist.
After making and exhibiting assemblage boxes for more than a decade, I began working on two-dimensional collages in 1994. I turned to collage so that I could continue working with found images in a different medium.
My layered, cumulative process of collaging, sanding, and repainting, leaves room for the kinds of intuitive material and pictorial juxtapositions that can only arise from the unconscious mind.
My new Botanical Series was inspired by antique botanical illustrations from masters of the genre who worked between the 13th to 18th centuries. In my large panels I've combined these flower drawings with vintage product labels from Chinese firecrackers, and from apothecary and cigarette paper packaging, syncing their typography and design to the history and character of the flowers.
Juxtaposing the pre-industrial view of nature with the logos and advertising of recent eras, I've paired the common and overlooked detritus of various cultures with the classically beautiful.
Michael Mew 2008
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Artists
