Afterlife: Bodies
Michael Watson 12.16.2024 - 02.27.2025 Narthex Gallery
About The Exhibition
For artist Michael Watson, rice is a staple in both his work and upbringing. In his Filipino-American home, rice was shared at every meal. Watson explores the symbolism of this humble grain through his artistic practice as a way of representing the body. The subject is one of dispersed organic matter, yet it remains grounded in real-world and spiritual applications as an integral part of sustenance, celebration, and mourning across cultures.
He posits that each person—the body and the soil, the corporeal and incorporeal—are inseparable and indistinguishable from one another. The destruction of rice to create a new image reflects the cyclical nature of nourishment, expansion, and dispersion, as we too return in death to nourish new life. He hopes for the work to reveal the interconnected between all living things.
About The Artist
Michael Watson’s process-based paintings, sculptures, installations, and performance embrace destructive and regenerative processes relying on experimental modes of production such as improvisation, destabilization and chance. He engages with found objects and natural materials such as plywood, rice and fire to mine the interstitial spaces of being, substance and imperceptibility through the use of rice and other materials as a substitute for the body.
Michael Watson’s work has been exhibited throughout the US including the Established Gallery, SPRING BREAK Art Show, Greenville Museum of Art, Hunterdon Art Museum, NJ, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, NY, Brooklyn Museum, SOMArts Cultural Center, San Francisco, CA, Ideas City Festival via AiOP affiliated with The New Museum, The Kitchen, NYC, Governor’s Island Art Fair, NYC, and the Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN. Watson’s commissions can be found in Dior Avenue Montaigne, Cheval Blanc Paris, and several residential projects throughout the world. He has attended residencies at Arts, Letters and Numbers, Averill Park NY, AIR Program 4heads Organization, NYC and the New York Studio Program, NYC. During the 2020 Pandemic, by Cosmina Ene. Currently, he is participating in the ChaShaMa Space to Create studio program in New York City.
Watson received an MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design and a BFA in Painting from the Art Academy of Cincinnati.
Body II, Michael Watson