Michael Caines

MICHAEL CAINES

    Artist Statement

    Bio

    Gallery
      "History Is No Joke"
      April 18, 2003 - May 11, 2003

      "Good Medicine" and others

    In the Press

    Contact
      caines@ca.inter.net

ARTIST STATEMENT

There is a thread that runs throughout my work reflecting themes of injury related to sexuality, imagination and nature. In recent work these themes have been distilled into paintings and drawings featuring images of apes, rabbits and human figures.

In this work rabbits have emerged as central characters. At first I thought of the rabbits as having a sexual connotation in their tendency to reproduce rampantly. I had been working with images of primates posing as doctors and nurses, offering their services to young male patients. That work was a reflection on my experience of sexuality as a teenager. I saw the rabbits manifesting a different kind of healing image - more blind production than the playful buffoonery of the apes. However, as these drawings and paintings developed, the rabbits have taken on a more sinister or ambivalent tone. Where the apes appear well intentioned, if potentially inept, there is a sense that the rabbits may be the cause of the predicament of the now buried human figures and are only playing at coming to the rescue.

White rabbits often appear in books as images associated with childhood innocence in saccharine mythologies constructed by adults in framing the world of children. However, from inside childhood the world is fraught with danger constructed as it is from scraps of fact, dreams, chaos, nightmares, imagination and invention. Think of Alice being led by the white rabbit down a hole into a subterranean world. In these images I have attempted to capture something of the savagery of the childish imagination, painting speculative fictions where the world has been restructured with the viciousness and sensuality of a child’s logic.

Injuries sustained to identity, sexuality and imagination make waves that propel us forward through our histories and create currents in the bigger histories which encapsulate our own. At this time my interest as a painter is to allow the histories that surround me to leak into the painting space, re-imagining them through the lens of my own stories.

BIO

Michael Caines is a painter and filmmaker. His paintings, described by Eye Magazine reviewer R.M. Vaughan as being “rich and resonant as dark chocolate on a warm tongue”, have been exhibited in galleries across Canada. His film and video work has been screened at festivals in Canada, the USA, Europe, Egypt, South America and Asia.

Over the past twelve years Caines’ paintings have been shown at various artist run centers, including Open Space in Victoria, Artcite in Windsor, Forest City in London, and Art Space in Peterborough where he was also artist in residence. His work was included in the 1993 “Young Contemporaries” exhibition, sponsored by the London Regional Art Gallery, with a national tour. His most recent solo show was at Katharine Mulherin contemporary Art Projects in Toronto.

In 1998 Caines received the Best Emerging Film/Video maker award at the Inside/Out festival, and was artist in residence for the Lo Fi/Sci Fi residency program at Charles Street Video with a screening at the Images Festival in 2001. Caines’ recent film “The Boys Next Door”, (co-directed with Keith Cole), was an underground hit in Toronto, and was infamously rejected by the New York Underground Film Festival as “Repulsive”.

“History is No Joke” is Caines’ 12th solo exhibition.