Michael Childs

Librarian

 

 

3-31 March 2008

“Art in the Windows”

On view day and night

 

 

Mid-Manhattan Library

The Art Collection

40th Street @ 5th Avenue

New York, NY 10016

212-340-0871

Mon-Wed 9-9, Thu-Sat 10-6

 

Contact: Arezoo Moseni

 

The Art Collection at Mid-Manhattan Library is pleased to present Librarian by the emerging artist Michael Childs. For this site-specific installation, he has created a portrait of a place that has played a very large part in his development as a painter.  With the architectural language Childs has constructed a reflection of the outside environment surrounding Mid-Manhattan Library as well as the energy and light of the knowledge stored within the books and the information offered by the librarians.  The compositions, derived from his photographs, were painstakingly mapped out over a period of months with the areas of color continually tweaked to achieve the spirit of renewal. The exhibition series “Art in the Windows” is curated by Arezoo Moseni.

 

Artist Statement

 

My vivid memories growing up in Toronto are from my many excursions into the heart of that small city during the economic and building boom of the 1970’s. To me it seemed that the city was forever and simultaneously in this kind of perpetual motion of destroying and rebuilding. Not so unlike the feeling of present day New York. Back then buildings, perhaps just twenty years old, took on the aura of ruins ready for the wrecking ball.

 

I was quite young when I began submerging myself in this urban activity. Often on my own, I felt some sort of comfort in moving through this beautiful, complex, active and changing architectural heart of the city. Along with the stimulation, it was comfortable for me and similar to the kind of personal shelter one may find in a great piece of music or a great film.

 

My interest in these places fed directly into my drawings and paintings. The act of making an image defines, as do our contemporary cities, the notion of undetermined boundaries being drawn. Each new building suggests five others being built. Each limitation of scale seems immediately surpassed by some new innovation, and each new idea requires the cleared space in which to work. While creating images, I have applied and made references to this visual logic.

 

My work in architecturally influenced abstraction has passed through many phases, yet I have remained constant in the dedication to the spirit of renewal. My continuing challenge has been in the contradiction of a simultaneously coherent and collapsing space. This is also what watching television feels to me now, the absence of spirit to which I refer. Painting, abstract painting in particular, continues to hold a small and very intense place in our vast cultural landscape and it allows me to investigate and to share those ideas which have held sway over my work for so long.