On view: May 1-7, 2026
Reception: Wednesday, May 6, 4:30-5:30 P.M.
Artist Statement:
This body of work explores the present as what remains of the past and the future as something that is yet to exist but must be actively constructed. This project approaches ontology phenomenologically. Reality is inseparable from our being within it: objects, concepts, and meanings do not stand alone from human experience but arise through our engagement with the world. Attempting to imagine pure nothingness exposes this dependence, since any such image still presupposes an observing subject. Existence, therefore, is always relational, situated, and meaningful from within lived experience.
Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s account of time in Being and Time, I want to treat time not as a linear sequence but as “ecstatic,” stretched across past, present, and future simultaneously. Human existence is characterized by thrownness: we always find ourselves already in a world shaped by histories, bodies, languages, and conditions not of our choosing. Moods such as anxiety make this condition palpable, revealing how memory persists as an active force in the present. The works approach these memories as luminous residues—fragmented yet persistent traces that continue to structure how the present is lived.
The exhibition also explores a more generative dimension of existence. If the past endures as residue, the future operates as possibilities already shaping the present. I investigate how unrealized futures manifest materially now, just as memory does: as tensions or materially existing forms. Although we cannot truly imagine nonexistence or what lies beyond death, human imagination persistently projects images into that void, producing presence where there is uncertainty.
Through processes of dissolution, erosion, and transformation, the materials leave behind traces that suggest forms without fully resolving them. These residues function as sites of projection—spaces where absence becomes generative. Rather than depicting emptiness, the work proposes that something always remains: memory, anticipation, or the imaginative construction of what has not yet come to be.
Learn more about Mike’s Art Process:
Studio Visit:
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