Tim McMichael’s work transcends the objective reading of maps by recasting them as aesthetic objects. In drawings, paintings, prints and sculpture, the artist employs geographic iconography such as borders, continents, and longitudinal and latitudinal lines to produce an elegant taxonomy of natural patterns, from flowers to honeycombs to geological strata.

       McMichael explores a subjective reading of the earth and its natural systems from climate change to continental drift.  The artist utilizes substances like resin and shellac as a kind of “modern amber” to fossilize images of the world.  Layering and suspending natural and cartographic materials in liquid hardening agents in works such as Border Portal and Polar Burst Hemisphere Bop, McMichael shifts between art and archive.

        A Rorschach pattern of the United States appears in several of Tim McMichael’s lithographic, embossed and screen printed acrylic works. The basic premise of the Rorschach test is that subconscious, psychological meaning can be extracted from responses to blots of ink.  Rorschach images are designed to evaluate an individual’s mental health, whether positive or pathological, based upon his or her verbalized interpretation of the blot shape. In McMichael’s work, the image of the U.S. replaces the ink blot, suggesting an ambiguous stimulus for underlying thoughts we may be reluctant to admit. The work would seem to suggest open-ended psychological interpretations of geography.

         In addition to the use of Rorschach imagery, the artist manipulates our visual perception through color and the reversal of the figure-ground relationship to create counterintuitive images of positive and negative space. McMichael’s Trident series depict the world’s continental land masses as blank space surrounded by a layer of muted brown volcanic ash. Rather than drawing the land masses in color, the artist presents the area around them as a silhouette.

      While McMichael’s use of hypnotic patterns seems to reference Op-Art, his use of optical illusions combined with geographic icons pointedly engages with ideas of visual perception. These works show the interplay between light and dark and positive and negative space. Similar to the famous image of Rubin’s vase cited in psychology, which can be interpreted in two different ways—as a vase in the center, or, as a result of two human profiles in symmetry—McMichael’s work demonstrates the tendency of ambiguous perceptual experiences to oscillate unstably between two or more alternative interpretations. In Gestalt psychology, the term multistability is used to describe evidence that we do not always consciously register everything we see.

       Tim McMichael questions the depiction of the world as known, colonized space. Like a map removed from its legend, his art establishes an as-yet-unnamed site for the imagination to explore its frontiers.  


Maiza Hixson
Associate Curator
Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati
 



Installation views of site Unseen