BIOGRAPHY
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Mike Salter moved to New Hampshire to complete is BA at Dartmouth College (2002-2006) and then to London to complete his MFA in Painting from The Slade School of Fine Art (2008-2010).
ARTIST STATEMENT
Growing up in the digital age, Mike has studied the science of mirroring and transcription since his first drawings of video game characters from NES cartridge boxes. Amidst the ensuing technological flurry of Napster, P2P sharing, Facebook and The Pirate Bay, Mike learned the logic and techniques of appropriation, theft and reverse-engineering. Everything from cartoon characters to photographs were disassembled and remade for the simple pleasure of what it is to 'see something differently'.
Mike's paintings expose his early proclivity for destroying and rebuilding; the canvases themselves are the unified field where his particular brand of theft, assembly and experimentation takes place. His current works are, in their essence, an homage to those visions and memories which remain from his years spent in Los Angeles. Interruptions in the landscape, dramatic lighting shifts and a sense that the scenes are distant, fractured or seen through a foggy glass lay bare the strange alchemy of turning memories into image.
Mike's paintings are marked with sense of restlessness, of a fugitive locus of meaning, of a world without any one particular myth. The paintings resist major camps of aesthetic duality: good and evil, life and death, deposition and ascension, dirty and clean, true and false - they are all exchanged like chips at a casino for the possibility that real meaning lies in between these dualities, ever surfing a Mercurial desire to see, "what if?"
Mike often wonders what it would be like if Hermes made paintings today.
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2011
Creekside Open (selected by Dexter Dalwood), Arts in Perpetuity Trust, London
Led To Alter, Wilton Way Studios, London
2010
Art Attack; Hogarth WW, London
Different Light Here; Le Garage, Brixton, London
Dreck; www.dreck.co.uk, November, 2010 contributor
MA/MFA Degree Show; Slade School of Fine Art, London, June 9th, 2010
Istanbul was Constantinople; Hush Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey
2009
Anger Management, Alsop Space, London
Slade Interim Show; Woburn Research Centre, LondonEDUCATION
2008 - 2010 Slade School of Fine Art - London, England; MFA Fine Art
2002 - 2006 Dartmouth College - Hanover, New Hampshire; BA with Honors, Studio Art Major