Michael Kareken, a Tacoma, Washington native, moved to Minnesota in 1993 after ten years of studying and working in New York. Since his arrival in Minnesota, Kareken has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards including the Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship, Arts Midwest, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Vogelstein Foundation, and a residency fellowship from 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. Most recently, Kareken received a 2007 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant. He currently teaches painting and drawing at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
Kareken’s recent work features urban landscapes depicting industrial recycling facilities in the Twin Cities. This new body of work portrays Rock-Tenn paper recycling plant in St. Paul and American Iron metal scrap yard in Northeast Minneapolis.
Kareken’s St. Paul studio is adjacent to Rock-Tenn. He writes, “Looking out my window, I see a never-ending stream of semi trucks pulling up next to the plant disgorging mountains of used cardboard boxes, packing materials, and bales of compressed paper. The paper is dumped in a concrete yard, forming a constantly shifting landscape that rises and falls, spreads and recedes as the days pass. The plant is in operation 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Despite the constant bustle of activity in the yard, the piles never disappear. The workers call them 'the urban forest.'"
“The metal and paper at these two facilities is organized by the workers into enormous piles; each of a similar type, but tending to resist categorization and orderliness. Wind blows the paper out of its neatly defined piles and stacks and scatters it across the yard. Crushed into cubes, the rusted metal bends and twirls, creating organic rhythms at odds with the rigid geometry imposed upon it. The imagery is rich with associations - it speaks of life and death, growth and decay, order and entropy, structure and chaos.”
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