Michaella Park:
I work at the intersection of painting, sculpture, and craft. I use art as a productive way to connect emotions and processes. Many of my works deal with patterns, mainly textile, in process and product. Patterns are reliable and predictable, but often require a meticulous, hands-on process that can be both meditative and exasperating. It is through cutting and stitching, unravelling and crocheting, destroying and reconstructing that I bring meaning to the objects I create. It is also in this process of pattern making that I find comfort and translate my fears, nerves, and anxieties into coherent and meaningful works.
The emphasis on the process and production also allows me to connect my work and myself with the time, labor, knowledge, and history of objects that are often mass-produced like textile and clothing. In a post-industrial society like the US, we consume and take for granted the availability and affordability of everyday objects without acknowledging the social and environmental costs of production. My work challenges and questions the structures that disconnect and distance us from these hidden costs, and their consequences.
A rug made of materials found around my childhood home including (but not limited to): unfinished projects, old scraps of fabric, yarn, plastic wrappers, headphones, jewelry, feathers, rafia, shoelaces, beads, mail packaging. The disparate but elemental fibers become cohesive through crochet. It is an object that consumes and becomes its environment but also chronicles my personal history and compulsory retrospection during an abrupt homecoming during the pandemic. It also reflects a repetitive yet meditative process that holds my uncertainty and worry about what comes next.
mixed media (acrylic on canvas, acrylic on paper, plastic)
An installation of an improbable desert space framed by textile-esque panels made of intricately cut paper and plastic. Its fragmentation explores distance, disconnect, and individual perception. The deconstruction creates a space in which the viewer has the agency to move through the installation and maintain agency in how they experience it. Each layer distorts but adds meaning to the base painting where one can find clarity through obscurity as well as think about how grids, screens, boundaries, and patterns inform our understanding of the world. Who holds the power to create boundaries and influence movement? Who holds the power in creating frameworks of perception? What is lost from distance, and what is gained?
