Third-year School of Art student Stephen Michaels works in mixed media, including costumes and wearables, drawing, photography, video, writing, sculpture, and installation. In his work, he uses mythology as a vehicle to create symbology within abstraction. Michaels is interested in the way archetypal phenomena are reduced to symbols in mythological narratives and how re-interpretation can permeate them. Pulling from Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, esoteric and occult stories, he reinterprets and refigures them into his own visual language. He is interested in the visual culture of tarot cards, and specifically the dichotomy within their images that they are cryptic and symbolic, but also legible through the deduction of their contained symbols. Michaels is bringing a Queer reinterpretation to age old ideas that are at once cemented and forgotten. With the use of costume, he inserts himself into these narratives, while using his body as a tool to create a dynamic image. He uses writing to articulate these theoretical frameworks within his work and to build a language within poetry that acts parallel to his visual arts practices.

“Phonetics” opens at The Frame Gallery October 26, 6:00-9:00pm.