michael lent

statement

 
 

I am an intermedia artist working with drawing, text, video, and installation; exploring time-based and new media as a method of art making.

I’m fascinated by formal elements like line and shape and their influence across media. Recently I’ve focused on colour, its abilities to transform and its repercussions on image and idea, its use as a medium, and the materials from which it is made. I am falling in love with my materials, which makes the physicality of my work at least as important as the conceptual elements that inform it. Colour itself has the power to transgress its limits by highlighting the dynamic of an internal state and its materialisation in people or spaces. In this way, I am interested in how basic elements like colour and light come together in digital media, and how they can be reexamined/redefined in more traditional media. I want to master colour like some form of ancient martial art by shaping form, line, light, and space while using my hand, ink, and technology as tools.

I’m interested in finding ephemeral places and defining their space in my work. These spaces are frequently transient, and I document their momentary existence in order to explore them in the studio. Often I build up transparent layers in video or drawings that reveal the space in and around materials.

I strive to construct an epistemology that unites conceptual theory with these formal elements in my own practice. My work is based on a tradition of artists and thinkers who have worked continually to not only hone a craft, but to challenge notions in ways of working. My practice is at the intersection of experience and concept within the congruent history of technology as a tool (but not the only means) to create art. I want to explore and expand my visual language to create work that can exist outside of my own understanding and inform the experience of others.