ARTIST STATEMENT:

My work explores the notion that the landscape we inhabit and interact with leaves an impact on our perception. I am interested in the boundaries between the intellect and the senses, a position where artistic and systematic methods of analysis interact. My work is a means to investigate the nature of image making through the combination of various ideas, influences, and objects relating to both natural and constructed environments. Through "reorganizing" our perception of the world, I explore the process of reconstructing what is familiar. These characteristics in turn allude to something new. A territory that becomes the artist’s practice to define, generating meaning by transforming the perceptible to what is legible. It is this synthesis or visual residue which echo both environment and origin, providing a point of departure or a position of arrival regarding how we can model reality.

Michael Baum

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY:

Michael Baum was born in 1975 and raised in a rural town in south eastern South Dakota. He left the plains of the Dakotas in his early twenties for the mountains of California, Wyoming, Montana and Alaska. His interactions with nature and the wilderness became the impetus for his graduate studies in fine art, which he completed at Washington State University. Over the course of the last two years, Michael has participated in multiple printmaking exchanges and group exhibitions. His group exhibitions include Chance Operations at Ludwigsburg University in Ludwigsburg, Germany and “Invisible Landscapes” at the Primo Piano Living Gallery, Lecce, Italy.  Baum’s work has also been accepted into multiple public collections, which include the Museum of Art/WSU in Washington, the Boise Art Museum, as well as, the Missoula Art Museum. For more information about the artist please visit his website at www.michaelbbaum.com.