Michael Rees
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Michael Rees is an interdisciplinary media artist. He combines sculpture and animation as a means to explore the moral implications of artificial life. He has exhibited his work at the Whitney Museum in the 1995 Biennial exhibition and in 2001 BitStreams exhibition. He has shown his work in one person projects at the Aldrich Museum, the Marta Museum in Hereford, Germany, and at the Kemper Museum, Kansas City, Missouri. Michael has received a National Endowment for the Arts award, a Creative Capital Grant, and a DAAD grant. He has taught at New York Institute of Technology, Washington University in St. Louis, and Oberlin College. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Edelman Foundation, Luzerne, Switzerland, the Science Museum in London, England and the Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. He is also included in many private collections. Michael has pioneered the use of computers in sculpture employing both animation modeling programs and computer aided manufacture devices to create his work.
Rees work maintains three prongs of the same fork in his work . These can be loosely related to correspond to a body mind spirit dynamic. The body refers to the Monster series and its attendant animations. These are concerned with the manipulated body and with multiple consciousness folded into an animate constructed body. The mind refers to the Sculptural User Interface with its parallel attendance to tendencies in conceptual art and computer science (the readymade, an extension of Beuys notion of social sculpture and open source software as a ready made made ready.) And finally the spiritual: Rees' Ajna Series is the conflation of western analytic science and eastern metaphysics with a special blend of surrealism from Batailles Visions of Excess.
