This week we welcome Michael Ambron, a visual artist based in Long Island City, NY. He received his BFA from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University and his MFA from The Ohio State University. His work has been exhibited at Jeffrey Deitch in Manhattan, Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, The Ice Box in Philadelphia, The Wilber Mansion in Oneonta, NY, The Dublin Arts Council in Ohio, the Memorial Hall Galleries at the Rhode Island School of Design, and has been featured in publications including Maake Magazine and ArtCritical. Ambron is a recipient of the Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship, the John Fergus Family Scholarship, The Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant, and most recently the 2022 Dedalus Foundation Materials Grant.

Ambron’s engagement with art making goes beyond just using paint; he is an expert at making it. He is the owner and operator of Paint Makers Notes,an organization that offers paint-making services, educational workshops, and professional consultation to artists and art institutions working with raw materials.
“Painting originates in the body. It exists as a radical form of trust in the potentiality that the materials hold. For the work to be made one has to believe that discovery is imminent— that something can and will be made clear if mindful action is cultivated and applied. Painting provides a way for me to record experiences that originate in the hidden, the guarded, and the emotive. This is where life and art are indivisible,” he writes.

“The practice of making is a method for liberating the subconscious into a new ‘presence’ or ‘body’ that is the painting. The forms that appear in my work are rooted in the visual phenomena of daily experience. Some are meditations on the state of our collective human experience and some are derived directly from vivid hallucinations that occur during episodes of sleep paralysis. The intensity and frequency of these experiences has greatly impacted my understanding of auditory, haptic, and visual modes of perception and continues to inform my practice. Often, I begin with a series of automatic gestures to help me recall with some immediacy, the malleable visions that shape my reality.”

“I work with crushed stones, glass powders, plant glues, and raw pigments to accommodate a wide range of material behaviors. Through the physicality of their surfaces, the paintings assert their objectness, while also appearing as otherworldly windows to alternate dimensions or hallucinatory realms. I attempt to record or transcribe moments of engaged awareness through breathing techniques, repetitive sound and mark making, sensory deprivation, and the freeing or restricting of bodily movements. These methods result in an environment that resists known experience in favor of an unknown potentiality central to the exploration of wonder. The goal of creating is to challenge the rationality of the systems we inhabit as individuals and as a collective body.”

Michael’s solo exhibition, “NO TIME,” is currently on view at Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn through March 17. See more of Ambron’s work on his website and Instagram.