Escape Artist

source: highlike

Work: Love death, family, memory, myth, god, faith, goodness, authenticity, worth Time memory, myth, memory, death, authenticity, age, boredom, worth Faith god, spirituality, death, ideas, myth, hope, authenticity, worth Identity faith, myth, memory, love, race, authenticity, worth Expression emotion, affectivity, presence, absence.
Image: Escape Artist 2009 stones, 2 shades of yellow paint, yarn, framed picture of Harry Houdini 70x44x84 inches.
Photographer: Mike Calway-Fagen
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source: mikecalway-fagen

I’m continually drawn back to the land, people, and place that has been a focal point for so much of my adult life. Tennessee has left an indelible mark on me: a stalwart commitment to the traumatic and defining past , a susceptibility to myth, an unabashed desire for romance all deeply entrenched in my sense of self. My conceptual interests deal with some big ideas, eeking out space to understand questions like human worth and insignificance, existence as animals, faith, time, death, love, and in large part tie together many of these far flung epicentric points. We are in jeopardy of losing our collective imagination, any meaningful contact with the relevance of daydreaming, and becoming exceedingly more grounded. I make things for people to slow down, look, listen, think, and feel.
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source: juxtapoz

Mike Calway-Fagen is a San Diego-based artist that is currently working on his MFA from UC San Diego. His work critiques complacency and aestheticizes catastrophe. With an interest in resuscitating activism, his work offers upon alternatives to disaster, critiques on our creation of disaster, and a soft-hearted acceptance of our fate.
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source: littlepaperplanes

Mike Calway-Fagen produces work that is unabashedly both harsh and tender. Unbowed by either the plenitude or the injustice of existence, he brings forth both, asking us to see it all with clear eyes and soft hearts, and without fear. Mr. Calway-Fagen has shown across the country and abroad in venues such as Gazelli Art in London, the southXeast Biennial in Florida, QED Gallery in Los Angeles, Vox Populi and the ICA in Philadelphia, Islip Art Museum and Mixed Greens in New York, Banff Center in Alberta Canada, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. He has attended residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Sculpture Space, and others. In 2008 he received Tennessee’s Individual Artist Grant. His work has been reviewed in such magazines as Art Papers, ArtUS, and World Sculpture Magazine. He received a BFA from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville in 2006 and is finishing an MFA at the University of California in San Diego. Mike is represented by Gazelli Art in London.