Michael Ambron

Michael Ambron received his BFA from Tyler School of Art in 2007 and his MFA from The Ohio State University in 2012. He was awarded a full teaching fellowship between 2010-12 and subsequently taught painting and drawing at the University until 2014. In 2012, he was awarded the Dedalus Foundation M.F.A. Fellowship, as well as the Fergus Memorial Scholarship. In 2014, Michael began working at Kremer Pigments as an educator and lead paint technician. His practice is concerned with the ritualistic cultivation of altered states of consciousness as it relates to painting, drawing, and dance. He is currently based in Long Island City.

Statement
My work is primarily concerned with perception and the development of sustainable systems for investigating altered states of consciousness. The act of creating distance from familiarity offers an opportunity to destabilize our normative states of consciousness in order to peer into the margins of perceptual experience. When vision falls apart, when identification with form has been stripped away, what remains is an essential awareness, one that engages gesture and the structures of narrative that accumulate around the emerging image. I draw inspiration from direct hallucinatory experience as well as ongoing research into the ways in which memory is stored within the body. The works are composed of stone chalks, glass powders, pigments, and clay, often affixed to found substrates. These materials are selected for their varying degrees of agency and act to both repel and absorb the ensuing forms veiled and inscribed across the painted surface.

Interview with Mike Ambron

Questions by Nancy Y Kim

Hi Mike! Your work focuses on perception. I understand that some of your interest in perception comes from a more personal place, a history of sleeping disorders. Can you talk to us about that and how you started bringing those experiences into your painting? 
Yes, a lot of my interest in perception has come from experiences of hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations, but even as a kid I was completely fascinated by phosphenes and visual static. I would stay awake for days just to see what would happen to my vision. I kept a dream journal and practiced lucid dreaming. Later, I experimented with psychedelics and sensory deprivation, I got into meditation and breathwork, and began developing systems to influence my perceptual awareness. The sleeping disorders started in my late teens as closed-eye hallucinations. I would see light where there wasn’t any and the dark became unnervingly animated. I developed a bit of insomnia and had a few episodes of sleep paralysis, but it wasn’t until my early twenties that I learned what hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations were. I woke up paralyzed one morning to the sight of a shadow figure walking around the room. The figure walked up to me, placed its hands on the bed, and tilted its head to observe me. On one occasion the figure spoke to me and on another it touched my head and shoulder. When my doctor told me this was a mental phenomenon I was hooked. I wanted to learn everything I could about the nature of perceptual experiences, but I wanted to be an active participant and not a paralyzed observer. I started carrying out all kinds of experiments to test myself. I floated for hours in sensory deprivation. I worked in only red or blue light to record changes in affect. I locked myself in a room with a giant canvas and a bag of mushrooms. I dropped acid and drew self-portraits from the melting faces in the mirror. I walked around for hours without opening my eyes and spent days without speaking. I tried everything I could think of to provoke a perceptual response and produced hundreds of works in the process. Today, my hypnopompic visions are much more abstract. I occasionally wake up to colorful rows of concentric circles or translucent webs of diamonds. I see red light on the right side of my visual field and jittery cutouts that drift around the room. These occurrences are fairly infrequent now, but no less interesting. I might have two or three visions one month and then nothing for several months. In order to work with these or any perceptual experiences, I find it helpful to break them into parts: kinetic, structural, emotional, chromatic, photic, whatever aspect I find myself stuck on. Then, I choose materials with properties that somehow relate to these aspects and use them to develop systems of marking, printing, embossing, or carving in order to describe a specific event. Sometimes I change materials in the middle of the system just to reduce familiarity. Evolving the systems increases the chances of novel interaction, but it also challenges the persistence of emergent forms. If an image remains vibrant whether drawn in glass or mud I pay closer attention to it. These become the elevated forms.

It seems your works go beyond looking at visions, your process seems to be one where you actively instigate and provoke visions too--as if the painting is an active back and forth between you and your perceptions. Is that safe for me to say? Can you talk to us about that process and how your process has developed throughout your practice? 
Yeah, I would say there is definitely a feedback loop happening. The act of painting is never the same thing twice. I see it as a ritual for cultivating novel forms of awareness. By varying the structures, materials, and modalities of the paintings, I can challenge my expectations and learn to see with fresh eyes. This keeps me present and searching. I don’t want to do the thing I know how to do. I remember showing my former teacher, Frank Bramblett, some paintings I’d made after developing a system for applying raw pigments to the surface. He said, “It seems like you figured out an interesting way to make these paintings. Now, stop doing that.” I always loved that advice. Frank knew I wasn’t looking for ways to continue making a certain type of painting. He was  an artist who understood that cultivating systems was a way of expanding how we perceive. I try to utilize systems in a similar way to push me beyond the methods I’ve accumulated. Sometimes I paint in the dark, or press my body up to the surface of the canvas so I won’t see the whole painting. I might tie one end of the brush to the wall to modify its range of motion, or use reflective beads or metal powders to change the way light emits from the surface. Every change is a deliberate attempt to incite a novel response. 

How do you decide which forms or visual images or marks you want to explore? 
I draw nearly everyday and take note of what forms continuously arise. It helps me cultivate a generative state of mind and raises the animate qualities of my materials. I may draw a line in marker, but dream of its dimensional potentiality in stone. The freedoms I take in my sketchbook are not the same as those on the canvas, but they inform one another. I allow the forms to spill out onto the paper because the fluidity and speed of the hand encompasses the body, but not the other way around. For one thing, the body contains more mass and is composed of more diverse parts. The manner in which breath moves through the body also greatly affects the ways in which forms are produced. To take a shape and draw it two hundred times larger in scale and on completely different substrates is to engage the dimensions that challenge or support its existence. If the form is persistent, despite the shifting grounds, there is a greater chance of its integration into the painting as a whole. 

When you first started looking at how you look, you talked about the content of your work in a more distanced way, an interest in perception in general, but now you talk about the personal aspects too. I think for a lot artists it can feel somehow risky talking about the personal aspects of our work. Was it difficult to start talking about the personal? What kept you from talking about the personal early on? How did you decide to get personal? Was the decision difficult one?
It’s true, I held back much more in the beginning. I was reluctant to share my own personal experience because I was still learning to process and put language to it. I was testing the limits of my awareness and trying to define the edges of reality for myself, but I was afraid the work would only be viewed through the lens of psychedelics, or sleeping disorders, or visionary solipsism. Ultimately, I was just wrong. People took interest and shared information and personal accounts. The community around me, especially at Tyler School of Art, pushed me deeper into my research and encouraged me to share more. When I contemplate the structures of reality today, I feel much more connected than separate. There’s something profound in sharing one’s experience. It establishes a relational awareness and helps cultivate intention. The decision to share, however, is a choice that has to be renewed repeatedly. In my case, I’m incredibly lucky. I’m married to an artist who’s interested in these things. We share research, confirm one another’s experiences, and support the development of each other’s practices.

Your works have a feeling of being in a state of emergence and at times a remaining artifact from a kind of grappling with imagery or ideas. When looking through a set of pieces, I might first notice a particular form. It seems you will repeat that form on the picture plane allowing each distinct iteration to float in its own space on the canvas. As you work with them more throughout your paintings, they start to interact with each other and layer, they become active. It seems as if we are viewing a thinking process, a journey of understanding. There is a feeling as if we are excavating an idea or feeling alongside with you.
Wow, that’s a very thoughtful way to put it, I hope it rings true. The works definitely feed off of one another and sometimes an idea or feeling is too big for one painting. The gains of one piece might bleed into the next and I tend to work on several at once. Each painting contains its own unique consciousness and has the ability to affect the activity of others. The paintings become more like environments, cultivated for the extraction of certain resonant forms. Eventually, however, the conditions that evoke one kind of experience will elicit something completely different. This is why repetition is so important. Many of the paintings are composed of dozens of layers and hundreds of drawings. Their surfaces are compressed skins whose protruding contours reveal points of contact with once visible forms. 

You have incorporated a variety of materials within your work – sand, glass, metal shavings, even chewing gum, etc—yet they are firmly in the world of painting. What do you find about the material of paint that lends itself so well to exploring the inner consciousness? What is your relationship to paint as a material? How do you decide on the materials you add to your paint? What materials from the outer world do you find best to capture your inner world?
Paint is fluid until it is not, just like experience. There is a moment of dynamic exchange followed by a crystalized film or residue to mark its spatial and temporal history. Painting is a way of marking our experience in order to affirm it. The marks we leave behind are a testament to our having been present. Raw materials are the perfect parallel to the dimensions of support and resistance we meet in our own realities. They are the atmospheric building blocks upon which our experiences are composed. They contain the conditions of density, porosity, malleability, viscosity, they absorb or repel us, and they actively color, distort, and magnify our experiences. Working in a pigment shop, I tend to experiment with just about anything I can get my hands on and take note of any unique characteristics I discover. Sometimes a pigment possesses an internal geometric structure that makes it particularly luminous or dimensional as paint. I’m interested in these kinds of depths, where internal structure and external presentation are so mirrored, but I’m equally intrigued when my expectations go unmet. Knowing what a material can do does not ensure its conceptual efficacy. I began using glass beads in my work because I’d hoped to capture the glowing quality of the shapes I’d seen during episodes of hypnopompic hallucination. When I finished applying the glass beads, I shined a light in the direction of the painting and the shapes lit up. As I moved closer, I realized that the magnification of the beads was relative not only to the position of the light, but also the position of my head relative to the light. This meant the animation of the forms was contingent on the movement of the viewer. In some ways this brought up interesting possibilities for bodily participation, but in other ways it engaged the politics of artifice and detracted from my initial material interests. When I painted over the glass beads, I discovered that the shadows cast by each individual bead seemed to exaggerate the depth of the picture plane and added volume to the painted forms. Even as my expectations were subverted I could see new possibilities emerging. This is a kind of material freedom that liberates the work.

Now, I notice something new starting to emerge. It seems cartoon arms and legs are making appearances. Can you talk a little bit about this new imagery?
Just before falling asleep one night I saw a sudden flash of light, followed by a cartoon image of a gloved hand crashing through the windows of a burning church steeple. It was lit up like a projection on the back of my eyelids and it reminded me of the closed eye hallucinations I’d had when I was younger. It lasted only seconds but it jolted me awake and I immediately tried to sketch it down. The tangibility of the experience kept me fixated on it for weeks. At first, it was kind of an artistic crisis to see my sketchbooks filling up with “Mickey Mouse hands.” I kept thinking of all the unwanted associations that would creep into the work, but the images persisted and eventually the hands, arms, torsos, and legs made their way into the paintings. I had to own it before I could understand the consequences. Once I let the forms in, I realized that the continuity of their structure offered an opportunity to enact specific kinds of distortion that would not be recognizable on more abstracted forms. I could use them to indicate repetition, reverberation, echo, the stretching and skewing of time and scale. They became profane objects through which I could examine violence, psychic trauma, and disembodiment. They became tangible in a way I had struggled to achieve when transposing sketches in the past.

Your scale and process seems very much engaged with the body. At times you are on your belly on top of the piece as you are making. Does the physicality of your process and scale of your pieces activate a deeper connection to your content?
I think physicality outweighs scale. Touch is incredibly important to me and creating anything requires a certain level of intimacy and exchange. Without sensitivity to the tools or materials I find it impossible to make any real discoveries. The scale of the work tends to shift from handheld to wall sized, but I always try to immerse myself. When I work with materials that engage all of my senses I find it easier to enter a state of flow and achieve balance. If I can connect the body to the materials in a real way, I believe the work can transcend its physical boundaries.

What are your studio must-haves? How do you get started? Are there processes or tools that help activate the connection between your thinking and your making?
My lights are essential. They’re a mix of PAR lamps, halogens, and incandescent filaments that have traveled with me for fifteen years across three states and two countries. Having control of the light in my studio greatly affects my consciousness. The fluorescent and LED lights you find in every school, office, and studio building create tangible distortions in the visual field and disrupt my ability to think clearly. In order to be present I need to be able to see my materials clearly, so the first thing I do when I get to the studio is shut off the fluorescents and plug in my lights. When my vision is clear and painting is effortless I see paintings unfolding every time I close my eyes. Aside from that, pigments are a must-have. They are the internal source of light in the work just as the light rig is the external.

Do you ever get artist’s block? Do you ever get in your own way? What do you do to unblock yourself?
I definitely make work that I destroy, so I’m sure I get in my own way, but I don’t typically go very long without painting or drawing something, even if it means scribbling. Sometimes I just need to move my hand and find rhythm. When I don’t know what to paint I usually stop what I’m doing, take a few deep breaths and paint waves. The paintings don’t have to be anything. They simply offer a way of recording the activity of the breath. If the breathing is labored and short the waves are irregular and choppy. If the breathing is calm and focused the waves are rhythmic and even. I’ve been doing this for at least fifteen years and it always clears my mind.

You’ve lived in New York City for 6 years now. How long did it take for you to feel like a New Yorker? When did you feel like a New Yorker?
I don’t know if I can say what makes someone a New Yorker. For a lot of people it equates to realizing that you can survive the city, even as it actively pushes you away. It took at least three years to feel like this was my home. The first two and half years were just an exhausting hustle of too many jobs, too many aches and pains, and too little time. Once I narrowed it down to one job things got easier.

The city is so rich with activity. It can be such an onslaught of visual, auditory, olfactive activity…For someone as sensitive as you to their surroundings, do you find it directly affecting your work in a particular way? How has moving from Ohio to New York affected you?
Yeah, the city hit me like a ton of bricks. Ohio was so comfortable and clean and people were so nice to each other. New York was almost comically the opposite. The lifestyle, especially in the beginning wore me out. One day in New York felt like three days anywhere else. You really do feel the constraints of living by the city’s clock. Everything revolves around your commute. My practice definitely became more fragmented and I found it harder to work on the same paintings consistently. My studio in Ohio was also three times the size of my Long Island City space and a third of the price. I had to scale down in the beginning so I could work on multiple paintings at once. Now that I’m more settled I’ve scaled up, but the fragmentation is still there.

NYC is a city where movements arrive. It is a city that attracts trends in fashion, music, etc. Living in NYC as an artist, what is it to be exposed to the latest movements and trends in art? 
It’s an education, to say the least. New York is a vortex for creative individuals. There’s always something to do or see, some new show, concert, dance performance or lecture. You have access to global exhibitions that might only land here, Chicago, and L.A. There’s just a ton of exposure all the time. At a certain point, you have to determine which dialogues you feel connected to and which ones to filter out. There’s only so much you can absorb before you have to close the studio door and work it out for yourself.

When going to museums and galleries, what excites you most about looking at the work of other artists? Are there certain artists that you feel a kinship with?  What is it about their works or their processes or way of being that you find engaging and exciting?
I think I’m most moved when there’s a tangible human presence in the work. When I stand in front of James Castle’s paintings, I feel as if I’m inside them, or that they’re inside me. My eyes are touched by his looking and I become more human in their presence. I always like what Robert Irwin said about art belonging to the realm of experience and that we take it with us when we leave. One needs little more than a discarded cereal box, a bit of oven soot, and some spit to make transcendent works of art. In Castle, painting is the residue of presence. This is something I strive toward.

We are all exploring art-making while in quarantine. Many artists have limited or no access to their usual spaces or materials and are making while under new conditions. Do you find yourself exploring new ideas, techniques, or ideas? 
I work in an underground studio that's fairly quiet and relatively safe, but I found it nearly impossible to be present there during quarantine. Thankfully, I’m married to a generous artist whom I admire immensely. My wife, Winnie Sidharta, works out of the living room of our apartment. She cleared a space for me so I could work at home and we’ve both been fairly productive. We’ve been powering through audiobooks, discussing art and music, and painting together almost everyday. I’ve mostly been making pieces that can be held in the palm of your hand, which is typically how I work on them. I've made about 200 hundred small paintings since the start of the quarantine, many of which feel like sketches. It’s definitely been a more contemplative time, and I’ve noticed many artists have returned to painting from life, which I too have found helpful. Sometimes, observing what’s right in front of you is the best way to focus on seeing. 

What are you thinking about or working on right now? What upcoming projects are you excited about?
I’m currently working on a two person show with a very talented artist named Kati Gegenheimer, for Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Philadelphia. I’ve also been preparing for 2 group shows in New York tentatively scheduled for the fall. Other than that, I’m just looking forward to diving back into the studio.

To find out more about Mike Ambron and his work, check out his website.