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Works on Paper
Thomas Erben is excited to present Mike Cloud ’s Works on Paper, an exhibition centered on a medium which the artist views as an integral and substantive part of his practice. These works – mainly collages, composed of bits and pieces from the physical world – function as a laboratory for ideas and evolve in tandem with the artist’s paintings, while also developing along independent lines integral to the medium itself. Starting with examples from 2003, a time when Cloud was still at graduate school, Works on Paper gives an insight into some of his central motivations, and their increasingly complex articulation.
What constitutes as value is of central interest to Cloud, also alluded to in the Chip Bag
Monoprints (2009), for which he used Dorito bags as printing plates, and undermined in
Helen Frankenthaler’s Obit (No. 1-18) (2014), which subverts ads from Artforum Magazine.
In these works, the words announcing exhibitions of famous artists and their galleries are
disassembled and nonsensically reconfigured, while still hinting at their original meaning.
The series Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (2003), demonstrates a use of ubiquitously
available materials, in this case cardboard as backing, combined with store-bought stretchers
into which the artist staples his collages. Cutting out segments of body parts from Arbus’s
eponymous book, he arranges these into “archetypes” like Brooklyn Jewish Girl with a Mexican
Friend or Masked Woman at a Masked Ball with Her Husband, each titled as their source
photograph. It is a key concern of Cloud’s that “the world comes into my work, though not
through my inner life,” and one way he achieves this is by looking through the eyes of others;
later examples include Sally Mann, Annie Leibovitz and Nan Goldin.
Cloud developed his Paper Quilts series in 2010. Here, identical pages from two Annie
Leibovitz photobooks are glued back to back and assembled as quilts, measuring about 60
x 60 inches and displayed hanging from the ceiling. Each quilt is punctured by cutouts of
what Roland Barthes would describe as the photograph’s “punctum” – the element that
“pierced” Cloud’s subjective perception – which is then indexically glued onto one of the
vertical edges. Quilts are usually seen as “craft”, where the hours of labor required for
production become a constituent part of their value, a measure which generally does not
apply to art. To complicate this difference, Cloud colors the glue he is using, thus making
his handiwork visible as an integral part of the artwork’s aesthetic value.
As evidence of the link between source material and finished collage, the installation Leibovitz
Orange (2008) includes the books , presented on a pedestal, from which its collage elements
were extracted.
As an example of how Cloud’s collaging methods migrate into his painting practice, the show
includes Seven Toys on a Maze, from 2006. Here, the artist’s idiosyncratic choice of material
moves even further into the three-dimensional, extending the sculptural aspect of his work.
After studying at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Cloud earned his MFA from Yale in 2003.
His work has been extensively shown at venues such as MoMA P.S.1, Marianne Boesky Gallery,
White Columns, Max Protetch, Apexart, and has been included in group exhibitions, such as
Frequency at theStudio Museum in Harlem; The long Dream, Museum of Contemporary Art
Chicago; Tough Connections, Kunstverein Aschaffenburg; as well as in galleries such as Honor
Fraser and The Landing (both Los Angeles). In addition to numerous reviews and interviews, his
work was part of Painting Abstraction by Bob Nickas, Phaidon Press (2009). He has been
awarded the inaugural Chiaro Award from the Headlands Center for the Arts, CA; a New York
Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and residencies at the Meulensteen Art Centre in the
Netherlands as well as the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in New York. Cloud is currently an
Associate Professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.Works on Paper is the artist's
seventh exhibition with the gallery (which includes solo presentations at The Independent,
2015; Art Basel Miami beach, 2016, and Frieze London, 2020.)
