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Celestial and Chthonian: New Work by Michelle Stitz
Opens Friday, June 16, 6 – 9pm
June 16, 2006 – July 16, 2006
Open Monday - Saturday 10am – 6pm, Sunday 11am – 5pm

>> preview the art of Michelle Stitz

Gallery Installation, Michelle Stitz, 2006

This presentation of paintings at Julie Baker Fine Art which opens on June 16th includes new work from two of Michelle Stitz's most successful series to date: Mare Tranquillitatis and The Forest Series. A look at her artist statements quickly reveal that Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility) refers to what ancient astronomers named the pools they imagined existed in the craters on the moon - Sea of Tranquility, Sea of Fertility, Sea of Crisis. These paintings “encapsulated in pools of resin” offer a seductive look into Stitz's own psyche as images, symbols and type sink and float in the seemingly calm waters of her mixed media works. She is not unaware of the parallel between the imagined seas of the moon and the mysteries of the human psyche. In fact, it is she who refers directly to Jung's idea of a collective unconscious as the source for her images and the reason they seem so hauntingly familiar. These works are aesthetically alluring and deeply inspired. The compositions are thoughtful and the lines are strong. The many layers of transparent resin and paint create a luminous, changing effect - a living body inside a steel frame.

Gallery Installation, Michelle Stitz, 2006

The 2nd series of numbered forests is decidedly Chthonian. These minimalist earthy works of blue sky and brown trunks seem to be fragments of one infinite landscape of trees. These beautiful smaller works fit together in clusters of many sizes on the gallery wall that seem at once haphazard and precisely placed. Stitz describes the process as “an attempt to recreate the memory of a wooded place”, with each layer adding more clarity to the vision, but possibly more credence to the illusion.

In the 2nd series, the layers are the layers of memory: intrinsically daedal as dust to dust, in the 1st, they are the stratum of the embodied unconscious -musings into dark bodies of space. In her interview on the collaboration of these two thoughts, the celestial and the chthonian (reversely), she refers to Plato who would aptly describe her journey as “learning to remember” all that has been collected and washed away - returning from the river of forgetfulness and beginning again to search for what was lost.

Michelle Stitz, 29 has a BA in Fine Arts from UCSC, including one year at the University of Bordeaux, France. She also completed a one month residency at La Posada del Morro Verge, in Brazil. She has shown with Julie Baker since 2002 when she was introduced as part of The Baker's Dozen. She resides in Santa Cruz, California and is currently exhibiting her work at Koelsch Gallery in Houston, David Lusk in Memphis, and Heidi Cho Gallery in New York.

- J. Shorpkenoff