The paintings are a homage to forms of skilled-labor. The detailed realist techniques of the painting are meant to be in harmony with the aesthetic details of the objects themselves. They are about skill and labour and a detailed attention to form. It's about the desire strive for perfection and control, and the pleasure of formal integrity.
The images are appropriations from auction catalogs and each are selected carefully for what they signify. From time and temporality, to geology and geography, photography and printed-matter, the figure and the aura, I am interested in how they frame larger questions of the past into the present. They are weirdly contemporary yet simultaneously historical. They exist in this gap, an interval between the two.
I am interested in how these objects have outlived their owners. Time and time again, they have passed from one owner to another. In this way, you could say that they are haunted. The revenant objects and their histories live on to haunt the present age.
Sean Micka, 2015
Sean Micka b. 1979 Boston, MA. Lives and works in Brooklyn
Sean Micka was a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program, Studio Program from 2012-13 and 2013-2014. Micka received his BFA from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University (AIB) in 2002. Recent projects and exhibitions include Storytelling at Gallerie Charlotte Lund, Stockholm Sweden (2013); BOOK MACHINE, at Le Nouveau festival du Centre Pompidou, Paris France (2013); $72M Sale Shatters Warhol Record at Die Ausstellungsstrasse, Vienna, Austria (2011); and After Images, at Dvorak Sec Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic (2009). Negotiations was published by onestar press, Paris France, in 2011. Micka also participated in the AIRSpace program at the Abrons Arts Center from 2014-15, and is Adjunct Faculty at Eugene Lang College, The New School.
Micka's practice as an artist is inter-disciplinary and research orientated. Micka’s paintings and drawings, objects and texts explore concepts of appropriation and representation, time and temporality, geography, geology and ideas of nature. Micka is also invested in the social and economic relationship between technical-skill and forms of labour, and the institutional arrangements of art and art history.
