
Michael MacMahon
WE ARE THE POINT FROM WHICH THE SEEING OCCURS
Each of us holds many landscapes in tension. These Landscapes reflect a living synthesis of people, place, need, curiosity, the seen and unseen forces that have brought peoples from different cultures and communities into contact across great distances. These landscapes are never inert, as people engage with them, re-work them, appropriate and contest them. As Landscapes operate on temporal scales they are tied to our identity or lack of identity, our roots or loss of roots. The Landscape is both spatial and temporal, as it encompasses activity, political action and evidence of changes past and present. It is a half imagined lived-in terrain, a distant and fantasized place held in memory.
These paintings aim to deny the possibility of a fixed space or moment to engage with the landscape. Images of the landscape are overlaid with a gridded color field. This color field is all the possible attempted solutions at navigating a maze.