Michael A. ROBINSON

Michael A. Robinson lives and works in Montreal. Michael is a multidisciplinary artist, producer of sculptural installations, drawings, cast works, and image based works. In recent years, his projects have examined the creative gesture, its conditions of emergence, and the position of the artist in face of art world conventions. Working with immediacy, his work valourizes questioning and opening over conclusions and affirmations. His art practice is reflexive, critical, and materially speculative.  

Recent solo exhibitions include, The Object as Evidence, SL Gallery, New York, New York, 2019, The Gift of Oblivion 2018, Galerie Diagonale, Montreal, and Either/And 2016, which was presented at ArtHelix, Brooklyn, New York. Group shows include Spring Break Art Show NYC, 2020, Other Worlds, Washington Project for the Arts, Washington D.C., 2016 and Diphthong, Shirley Fiterman Gallery, New York, New York, 2015. His works are part of numerous public and private collections, including the Museé d'art contemporain de Montreal (MAC), the Musée nationale des beaux-arts du Québec, and the Canada Council Art Bank.

​

Michael teaches sculpture and drawing at UQAM's Department of Visual and Media Arts (2007-present) and recently he was full-time Artist in Residence, Professor MFA Sculpture, at Concordia University (2016-2017). He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University, in Montreal, and a Masters of Fine Arts from Université de Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne. 

​

​

” …that this strategy is a strategy without any finality; for this is what I hold and what in turn holds me in it’s grip, the aleatory strategy of someone who admits that he does not know where he is going… I should like it also to be a headlong flight straight towards the end, a joyous self-contradiction, a disarmed desire, that is to say something very old and very cunning, but which also has just been born and delights in being without defense.”

​

Jacques Derrida, The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations, in Philosophy in France Today, ed. Alan Montefiore, Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 34-50.

​

Strongly affected by this quote from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, I often muse that it could easily describe my approach to making art.

​

Employing formalist and conceptual approaches, my work plays deliberately on the mixing and juxtaposing of creative strategies as they relate to modernism and to contemporary art. I mix ideas and intuitions, with material playfulness and invention.

​

I often work with objects harvested from my everyday life.  For me, recontextualizing objects as ‘art materials’ is a way of drawing attention to the sometimes hidden meanings of objects, the role objects play in our lives and to what we think is and isn’t art.