Visiting Artist: Michael Krueger
I went to see Michael Krueger speak the Thursday before last, in Regis. Krueger showed works ranging over a variety of mediums, including, photography, printmaking and drawing. He showed us a sort of time line of the progression of his art; most of the more recent pieces were done using printmaking techniques. In his work he showed an interest in the mixing of contradictory ideas and the recombination of past with present. For instance some of his photographic work depicted the re-animation of inanimate objects such as cups, and pieces of fruit with different facial expressions. This he described as his fascination with the blurring of the “natural� world with “our� world. In some of his drawn pieces he took images of historical figures out of context by placing them next to modern objects, creating a framework for the reconsideration of history from a contemporary perspective. Out of the work that Krueger showed some of the pieces I enjoyed the most were the recent prints he has been working on. These are influenced by his own past, in producing them he works in collaboration with his past self, as he would put it. To compose these he took images from old high school notebooks where he doodled or wrote and recombined these previous life images with new imagery that relates to this past identity. A lot of Krueger’s work deals with history, even these are used to show history through identity. I got a first hand look at some of these prints a few days before this presentation when he spoke to my printmaking class. His process of re-creating the past down to very minute details such as a tear or a fold in the paper, but also manipulating that past, is really intriguing to me. Overall I think he was producing some really beautiful, content rich images, and if nothing else he seemed like a very interesting person.