The Arts and Architecture Conservancy at Saint Peter’s presents Afterlife: Bodies by Michael Watson, on view in the Narthex Gallery at Saint Peter’s December 16, 2024 through February 27, 2025. –
For artist Michael Watson, rice is a staple in both his work and upbringing. In his Filipino-American home, rice was one of the commonalities he shared with his relatives and ancestors halfway across the world. The subject of Watson’s rice works is one of dispersed organic matter, yet it remains grounded in real-world and spiritual applications as an integral part of sustenance, celebration, and mourning across cultures.
Watson explores the symbolism of this humble grain throughout much of his artistic practice. He posits that each person—the body and the soil, the corporeal and incorporeal—are inseparable and indistinguishable from one another. Rice allows the viewer to see the cyclical nature of nourishment, expansion, and dispersion; humans, too, return in death to nourish new life. Revealed is the interconnectedness shared with all living things, and the tending required to enrich those connections.
About the Artist
Michael Watson's process-based paintings, sculptures, installations, and performance embrace destructive and regenerative processes relying on experimental modes of production such as improvisation, destabilization and chance. He engages with found objects and natural materials such as plywood, rice and fire to mine the interstitial spaces of being, substance and imperceptibility through the use of rice and other materials as a substitute for the body.
Michael Watson's work has been exhibited throughout the United States including the Established Gallery, SPRING BREAK Art Show, Greenville Museum of Art, Hunterdon Art Museum, NJ, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, NY, Brooklyn Museum, SOMArts Cultural Center, San Francisco, CA, Ideas City Festival via AiOP affiliated with The New Museum, The Kitchen, NYC, Governor’s Island Art Fair, NYC, and the Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN. Watson’s commissions can be found in Dior Avenue Montaigne, Cheval Blanc Paris, and several residential projects throughout the world. He has attended residencies at Arts, Letters and Numbers, Averill Park NY, AIR Program 4heads Organization, NYC and the New York Studio Program, NYC. His work can be found in several publications including Caddisfly Project Volume 4, The Seeds of Creation: Art and Spirituality, by Cosmina Ene, Gwan Anthology: Volume Two, Forward Comix, and The Seeds of Creation: Artists During the 2020 Pandemic, by Cosmina Ene. Currently, he is participating in the ChaShaMa Space to Create studio program in New York City.
Watson received an MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design and a BFA in Painting from the Art Academy of Cincinnati.