BIOGRAPHY:
Michael Rees' work traverses an extraordinary range
of activities and efforts. He has shown at the Whitney museum twice
and has had numerous exhibitions both in the United States, Germany,
Turkey, and Spain. His work has been exhibited in New York galleries
and in private and public collections. It has also been exhibited
in Museums and University Galleries throughout the United States.
Rees has an enormous appetite for working in a broad continuum
of sculptural practice. His work utilizes performance, animation,
video, installation, sculptural objects, computer software programs,
and interactivity among other things. He is represented by Steve
Sacks in New York.
Rees'
first solo show in New York at the 303 Gallery had a desultory
feel made of clay and plaster, wire, steel studs, and other
common materials. It was reviewed in the New York Times and
the Village Voice. With each show, Rees' work continued to
evolve. Subsequent work consistently employed unusual manufacturing
techniques and significant conceptual rigor. He has had solo
shows at Basilico Fine Arts, Gorney Bravin and Lee, Universal
Concepts Unlimited and Bitforms Gallery. Although his first
solo show took place in 1991, Rees had been active as an artist
in New York since the late 1970's. He organized exhibitions,
performances, and actions throughout New York at the Gas Station,
local studios, empty real estate in SOHO and in Brooklyn and
at his own studio.
Rees
maintains three prongs of the same fork in his work . These
can be loosely related to correspond to a body mind spirit
dynamic. The body refers to the Monster series and its attendant
animations. These are concerned with the manipulated body and
with multiple consciousness folded into an animate constructed
body. The mind refers to the Sculptural User Interface with
its parallel attendance to tendencies in conceptual art and
computer science (the readymade, an extension of Beuys notion
of social sculpture and open source software as a ready made
made ready.) And finally the spiritual: Rees' Ajna Series is
the conflation of western analytic science and eastern metaphysics
with a special blend of surrealism from Batailles Visions of
Excess.
URL: http://www.michaelrees.com
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