Shifting Visions | Michael Kareken

Kareken, a Tacoma, Washington native, moved to Minnesota in 1993 after ten years of studying and working in New York. Kareken has been the recipient of grants and awards from the Bush Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the McKnight Foundation, Arts Midwest, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Vogelstein Foundation and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Kareken was the 1997 recipient of the Louise Nevelson Award for Art from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and in 2000 won an award for printmaking from the National Academy of Design. More recently, Kareken received a 2017 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant. He is Professor Emeritus at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where he taught painting and drawing from 1996-2023.

After spending many pandemic evenings sitting with friends on porches, Kareken became captivated by the imagery of reflections on windows – a concept that has now occupied years of obsessive study. In these complex compositions, inner and outer worlds blend together as the window both reveals and reflects two distinct spaces, the edges blurring with the artist’s fluid marks of conte and gouache. Kareken describes his work in the exhibition:

“People are absent from the work, although their presence is implied in the parked cars, porch lights, and dining room tables. The focus is on the space itself and the movements, rhythms and transitions between the overlapping scenes and objects. Based on observations of specific places, the images are inventions that combine multiple locations, points of view, seasons, and times of day. These elements are woven together in a way that is intended to feel at once cohesive and disjointed. I used what I observed in the window reflections as a guide, blurring edges to connect near and far, dissolving forms into shadows, establishing multiple light sources to create shifting focal points within the compositions. 

The repeated revisions and restatements mirror the experience of losing and regaining a memory, of forgetting and recalling that is at the heart of the work.”

Presented concurrently with Over Here, Over There | Doug Argue

Gallery Hours:

Tuesdays - Saturdays 12 to 5