Michael K. Aakhus {Oils​/Printmaking/Works on Paper/Photos}

As a gay man, traveler and a person deeply interested in the diversity of human culture my practice has been shaped by my growing awareness of the unique character of our shared world.  When I travel it is not to urban settings where globalization is in the process of shaping a monolithic culture but to those places that are remote, slow to change and have preserved, as much as possible, indigenous ways and beliefs.  So I go, to the remote small communities of Latin America, the Indian Himalayas, the villages and shrines of Southeast Asia and the Ivory Coast of West Africa.  The conquest and colonialization have been brutal, but the resilience of indigenous culture is short of remarkable.  What fascinates me is the ways in which indigenous cultures have used the contact to barrow and build on their own traditional beliefs.

 

As much as Picasso’s encounter with African art was instrumental in shaping cubism, my encounters with remote cultures have shaped the Magical Real world in my art. In this space I am weaving a new personal mythology that examines gender roles, traditional cultures and their persistence in the modern world.   A narrative begins to emerge reshaping my images into some new amalgam of their story and my own.  I look at religious iconography and spiritual questions from diverse cultures to inform the content of my art.  My process is to select a group of photos, some that I will use and some that I will put aside.  I rely on intuition to select images that have esthetic appeal and remembrances from travel.

 

An artist needs to build a compendium of works that are extensive and from time to time something almost magical occurs.  A painting or image that takes on a life of its own, hardly recognizable as something that you made.  In ages past they would have called it the muse, but a more modern view sees the emergence of subconscious connections to forgotten encounters and emotional responses that arrive at some magical real conclusion.  In the end the important work is not the painting or digital work that proposes the answer, but the work that in its transcendence raises some unsalvable mystery.