Michael Baum

I'm currently pursuing a MFA at Washington State University. My work explores the notion that the landscape we inhabit and interact with leaves an impact on our perception. I am interested in the boundaries between the intellect and the senses, a position where artistic and systematic methods of analysis interact. My work is a means to investigate the nature of image making through the combination of various ideas, influences, and objects relating to both natural and constructed environments. Through "reorganizing" our perception of the world, I explore the process of reconstructing what is familiar. These characteristics in turn allude to something new. A territory that becomes the artist practice to define, generating meaning by transforming the perceptible to what is legible. It is this synthesis or visual residue which echo both environment and origin, providing a point of departure or a position of arrival regarding how we can model reality.