Miles Conrad - Artist Statement

As a painter living in Tucson, I draw inspiration from the austere beauty of the desert landscape and the capacity of living beings to thrive under these conditions. Temperature is a distinguishing factor in both this type of environment and in the encaustic painting process. Heat creates and yet threatens. Like an ecosystem, beeswax is archival yet vulnerable. Within this territory of harsh extremes there is also morbidity, decay, and the constant risk of encroachment by forces both natural and industrial. Individual lives and the survival of whole species hang in the balance.

My work is best described as biomorphic abstraction, closely informed by a tradition of feminist, post-minimalist sculpture; although I am increasingly interested in issues of representation. I transform recycled industrial, mundane materials and found objects into relief-based encaustic forms evocative of shapes and patterns found in the body and in nature. “The body as macrocosm” metaphor holds renewed currency as we face epidemics and weather changes that are global in their scope.

Resume

2009 MFA Candidate- (Pending) San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA

2000 Citizen Leaders Institute- Center for Ethical Leadership, Seattle, WA

1999 BA Liberal Arts- Non Profit Leadership – Antioch University Seattle, WA

1998-1992 Painting- California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA

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