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No Common Ground.

My paintings always begin with a historical referent. For the past two years I have been obsessed with similarities between images created during the seventeenth century and contemporary advertising. These landscape paintings are an investigation into the meaning given to paintings of skies, storms, and clouds from the Dutch golden age. If tall clouds and destructive storms were seen as a memento-mori in an increasingly secular and capitalist driven society, what do paintings of brooding clouds mean to us now in relation to the ever-present apocalyptic worries of “late-capitalism”? The destructive nature of these particular clouds in relation to the signs is not present since the clouds are still in a developing stage. The paintings are therefore deconstructions of non-inherent meanings in historical painting as well as the transient nature of clouds and signs.

Mike Pszczonak is a recent graduate from the University of Guelph and is currently living and working in Guelph.