10.14 – 12.08.12
The term “urban fabric” often refers to everything that makes up the built environment, excluding environmental, economic, functional and sociocultural actualities. Using raw material culled from an archive of merchant posters Christopher Michlig collected from LA streets, Patternesque is a group of 16 collages, each a pattern study riffing on idiosyncratic typographic anatomy. While each collage is a distinct composition, common threads run throughout. Emphasizing the flexible, open-ended nature of the project, the work also suggests the morphology of urban space. Alongside the collages, Michlig presents a group of architecture-related relief sculptures. Based on a tradition of architectural model making in which massing models are used to dimensionally summarize the fundamental forms of buildings, Michlig’s “City Plan” relief sculptures interpret typographic space as proposed city plans. Reflective of the spaces from which the original posters were collected, while simultaneously nondescript, each city plan forces a consideration of the power dynamic of language itself as an imagined built environment.
Christopher Michlig received his MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California and works in a variety of media including collage, sculpture, film and video. Most recently, he’s been featured in solo projects at Marine Contemporary and Steven Turner Contemporary in LA, Volta 8 in Basel and 1000eventi in Milan. He work has been featured at the Fellows of Contemporary Art in Yellow, curated by Lia Trinka-Browne and in the 2006 LA Weekly Biennial. Michlig’s exhibitions have also included Desertshore, curated by Jan Tumlir at Luckman Gallery at California State University, Los Angeles and Resist Complacency, Consider Urgency, curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer at the Eagle Rock Center for the Arts in 2009.
