User:Mj pittman/sandbox

Michael Pittman - Visual Artist
Michael Pittman was born in Corner Brook, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada in 1977. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Memorial University (2001), and a research-led Masters degree in painting from the Waterford Institute of Technology in Waterford, Ireland (2006). He works with multiple media to create images and objects that are often informed by a tangled relationship between psychology, folk belief and personal narrative.

"Pittman’s narrative is contained in the layers of making and undoing. His aesthetic echoes the uncertainty found in the familiar, and explores these ‘hauntings’ as the shifting lexicon for approaching new encounters. His paintings are a palimpsest of erasures and washes that navigate multiple half-seen associations." His work "plots the airy geography between worlds of sleep and wakefulness, experience and intuition, the rational and the mad. Linking terrains of varying substance, his paintings and sculpture are shifting maps, marking territory as illusive as a childhood memory or an irrational fear. They ply the recognizable with the uncanny.” His “process of working parallels his conceptual concerns, allowing for the surfacing of nebulous or fleeting aspects of a place in between.”

In 2012, The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery in St. John's, NL curated a significant solo exhibition of his artwork entitled “Michael Pittman: Haunted Half” comprised of over 5 years of the artists visual explorations. In 2013 Pittman was a semi-finalist for the prestigious Sobey Art Award: Canada's pre-eminent award for contemporary Canadian art. In 2014 his artwork was included in "CHANGING TIDES: CONTEMPORARY ART OF NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR" at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. Pittman’s work will be exhibited in Venice, Italy in 2017 as part of the Benetton Foundation’s Imago Mundi collection at the 2017 Venice Biennale.