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 2009 McKnight Artist Fellowship. He currently teaches painting and drawing at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
“I have become fascinated by the piles of scrap material at local recycling facilities, which uncannily resemble the natural landscape in their structure and complexity, textural and topographical variety, transformations due to light and weather, and cyclical rhythms and patterns. Recently, my focus has shifted from broader views of these sites to the scrap material itself. Sorted and organized by type, it tends to resist categorization and orderliness – the wind blows the paper out of its neatly defined piles and stacks, scattering 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 – life and death, growth and decay, order and entropy, structure and chaos.”
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