You Are Not Here
Michelle Robinson 

Opening reception Saturday October 16, 5-8pm
Exhibition runs through October 31

A domestic secret or trauma, once revealed, shifts the concept of home from the comfort of nostalgia into the realm of the uncanny: a place of intellectual uncertainty, where the once-familiar now feels unfamiliar. Revealed secrets can’t be unlearned or tucked behind the safety of the facades we build, and it can be difficult to reconcile what we’ve learned with what we think we remember, or feel. This tension; this oscillation between interior and exterior, presence and absence, coziness and dread, is the focus of my current work. 

My practice is a combination of technological and traditional methods of making, creating digital composites of landscape and (un)homey objects. I build miniatures as manifestations of memories and photograph them as if they were found objects inhabiting the desert. Much like the miniature, the desert is a place of arrested time and by scaling up tiny replicas of domestic objects and situating them, vulnerable, in a formidable environment, I turn my insides out.

Michelle Robinson received her Bachelor of Environmental Design and studied computer animation at Texas A&M University. She has been an artist with Walt Disney Animation Studios for 28 years, with credits that include Frozen and Zootopia, and she is currently Head of Characters on the forthcoming release, Encanto. She also maintains an active personal studio practice and completed her MFA in Visual Art at the New Hampshire Institute of Art in 2019. She has been published in SciArt Magazine, and Precog Magazine, and exhibited her work at the New York Hall of Science, The Coastline Gallery and Chaffey Museum in CA, the Dairy Center for the Arts in CO, and Cecelia Coker Bell Gallery at Coker University in SC. She also recently juried a digital art exhibition and film festival for the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art in California.

www.michellerobinson.org 
@michellerobinsonstudio