About
For Michael Alan, art is a combination of aggressive action and close observation, a catharsis, a means of communication and a radical juxtaposition of dimensional elements. He challenges everything: concepts of figure, composition, media and movement, including his own. Exploring the ambiguity of time and history, Alan’s work focuses on crossbreeding and the relationship of destruction and creation. Voracious and wild, each work contains deceptively delicate, rhythmic line work and detail. Alan integrates all artistic materials, creating unlikely but true amalgams within his works and the concepts behind them.
His newest series of work, “The Destruction of Travel”, examines extreme states of change in the present moment – a social commentary on the current world state of instability, and constant, rapid metamorphosis. Vandalizing and shifting the picture plane, Alan uses methods of destruction to reveal introspective action-struggle, and literally depict the past, present and future contained within each work. Highly architectural and abstract, “The Destruction of Travel” roots out the intensity of change and inward panic.
Alan’s works decisive chaos and rough grace renders unique and frequently psychological studies of what Alan calls “chronic time exaggerators” (creatures caught in the past, present and the future, surviving in an alternate reality). These creatures were originally conceived as a critique of the progression of art history, and a reaction to living in a confusing art period. Embracing the idea of art as “all encompassing”, Alan has explored the chronic time exaggerators in every medium.
Each of these works inspires and anticipates the next. Alan’s definitive philosophy is “Art come to life.” He creates and directs performances based on his works; performers are made into “human sculptures” – literal living, breathing time exaggerators – who are then drawn. By capturing the energy and motion of live performance, Alan not only questions the tradition of art-making – it is the basis of many of his drawings and sculptures – but also how theater and time are perceived. They create a wrinkle in time when audience, artist and subject merge.
Alan was born in New York City during the infamous blackout of 1977. Raised in a consistently changing city, during a violent, rich and strange era – the 1980s – he has constantly questioned perceptions of time, space and the irrefutable symbiosis of creation and destruction.