Bio: Mike Stack is a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the University of Pennsylvania (BFA), and Purchase College, State University of New York (MFA). He exhibits his paintings, drawings and prints nationally and is the founder and coordinator of Sculpture-On-Campus, an outdoor invitational exhibition program on Pima’s East Campus. Stack’s recent work is on view in the Arizona Biennial 2020 at the Tucson Museum of Art.

Mike Stack 

Mike Stack is a painter and sculptor whose work is focused on experiencing the subtle thresholds of vision, color vibration and iconic symbols. His engagement with color is connected to how figures and forms can reverse the primacy of vision, where the ground of his paintings can become a primary read, while foregorund elements often recede into the background to become secondary contexts and/or content. His pallet is comprised of colors that reference whitewashed mineral-coated plastic bottles, industrial color swatches, and the chromatic glare of blanched out materials. In this way, his paintings are akin to noise cancellation, where the content and impact of disparate figures stand in for a rigourously constrcuted sense of mental architecture. Constantly reworking and devising parallel forms, colors, and the spatial logic of mutal contrast is what allows Stack's work to act as an inoculation from the multiplying pathogens of distraction. Meditative, immersive and graphic, his paintings have been written about as a reprieve from commerical culture and mediated experience.