Michael Gray, “Sessile Crown | Biscayne Bay Series,” 16″ x 16″, Monotype print on paper, 2018.
CLIMA: Solo Artist Series
presents
by
at
Hibiscus Gallery
Pinecrest Gardens
11000 S. Red Road
Pinecrest, FL 33156
Exhibition runs May 3 through August 3, 2018
Join us for the opening reception on
Sunday, May 20, 2018 from noon to 2 pm
Michael Gray‘s Life Forms is a solo show comprised of new works that address the loss of living reef tissues in Biscayne Bay.
This series of monotype prints are a documentation of the current state of the reef system which is being threatened by bleaching, disease, destruction, and pollutants exiting through urban waterways. Though the work depicts a threatened and disappearing environment, the prints are better understood as documentations of the physical experience Gray had encountered in the particular environment. Gray uses colorless abstracted form, gesture, repetition and intuitive mark making to represent his anxieties of habitat loss, the degradation of the natural beauty of his home, the disappearance of coral and the uncertain future of our oceans.
Gray has worked throughout South Florida documenting areas of refuge such as Everglades National Park. Each location, as Gray sees it, can be a microcosmic representation of life all over the globe. Life, death and regrowth are important to all natural cycles, however these unsaturated prints offer a view of a colorless, dark and capricious world on the verge of existence.
Michael Gray is a Miami based artist who has spent the past two decades observing the changes in the ecology of Florida including the Everglades, mangroves, ocean, wetlands, woods and fields. His diverse body of work explores the relationship humans have to the planet and he approaches it through the scope of our local Floridian ecosystem. Gray’s work tends to question whether we, as a species, are able to make changes to our way of life; even after the consequences of our actions become a reality. Gray is a graduate of Fine Art from Florida International University and has exhibited his work in several Miami locations including the Frost Art Museum, The Bakehouse Art Complex, and Laundromat Art Space.
CLIMA is a science | art platform addressing global climate change and sea level rise. It was developed by Xavier Cortada in 2015 in response to the Paris Climate Talks. CLIMA is presented at Pinecrest Gardens’ Hibiscus Gallery in partnership with Florida International University College of Arts & Sciences School of Environment, Society and the Arts (SEAS), the FIU College of Communication, Architecture + The Arts (CARTA), the FIU Honors College (Honors) and the FIU Sea Level Solutions Center (SLSC).