Artist Statement

Stew Leonard’s is the best supermarket. I’m not referring to their offerings, but to their blend of entertainment with the entertainment of consumption. We lean towards the cyclical, helping us to fall into a stasis, a zone where we are swamped, stewed in stuff. They get us when we are young, our initiation into a world of our desires being tampered with. False promises of satisfaction hit our blasé faces as we travel the same labyrinth daily. Painting is like putting up a wall, damning the flow. It arrests the momentum of the surge of triggerless signs that lock us into our Habitrails. The picture plane inserts itself, space is intercepted, meaning renegotiated.

I like to gently stamp the color-matched food item onto the surface of the painting. The meeting place, the touch, of the Dunkin’ to the canvas-face is a communion, not a food fight. From there, an image grows. By isolating the machine-formed food item into an intentional element of gesture, I build an effigy, a representation in which the thing, a doughnut, is part of a human form. I like to see these conjured individuals ambling along the city streets on their way to the very establishments from where they have been sourced. We eat the corporation as the corporation eats us.

Bio

Michael Wetzel was born in Mt. Kisco, N.Y. He received his M.F.A. from SUNY Purchase. He currently lives in New York City and works in Brooklyn. Wetzel has shown paintings, drawings, and sculptures throughout the United States, as well as in Europe and South America. His work has been included in Scream, curated by Fernanda Arruda and Michael Clifton at both Anton Kern Gallery and the Moore Space, Miami, Noctumbule at the Bibliotheque Thiers Paris, France, curated by Chris D’Amelio and Lucien Terras, She’s Come Undone, Artemis Greenberg Van Doren, New York, NY, curated by Augusto Arbizo, and 100 Sculptures, curated by Todd Von Ammons and Joseph Henrikson. He has had both solo and group shows at John Connelly Presents, 11 Rivington, Anthony Meier Fine Art, Caso Triangulo, Galerie Christina Wilson, Honey Ramka, Kristen Lorello Gallery, and RA Gallery, amongst others. He was the 2006 recipient of Deutsche Bank Fellowship, awarded jointly by Deutsche Bank Art, Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, and NYFA to 6 Fellows. He was most recently currently included in R U Still Painting? Curated by Falcon Art, at RRASP, NY.