Mike Stack

Mike Stack is a painter and longtime member of the Arts Faculty at PCC, where he has administered and taught a broad spectrum of art courses at all levels, including STEAM curriculum. He is a passionate advocate for arts education and engagement as vital to preparing students for meaningful and productive lives. 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. It will host its sixth cycle this Fall, Sculpture on Campus Program. Stack’s recent work is on view in the Arizona Biennial 2020 at the Tucson Museum of Art from October 2, 2020 – January 10, 2021.

I am compulsively drawn to visual events and the conscious impulse "to see." This work is the result of my experimentation with the thresholds of sight in a compressed, competitive environment of distraction. Shapes and forms that are flattened, folded, nostalgic, artificially organic, architectural, or teasingly animate, confront and enable distraction to help us find our way back "to see" the world it leaves in its wake.

My long involvement with color is deeply connected to this exploration. Here color itself distracts, reverses field, and creates secondary contexts. Color expresses variation and moves unapologetically. Color grids and color grinds. My palette is taken over by colors as flat as the whitewashed mineral-coated plastic bottles in the shower or salted and adrift at sea, the color made false by market testing, the color blanched by the glare of social contradiction: tainted tints that are coded human-made.

Maybe my paintings are akin to noise cancellation, where the content and volume is isolated and replaced by mental architecture. Or maybe this rephrasing and devising of parallel forms, colors, and spatial logic are an inoculation from the multiplying pathogens of distraction. This work is my reprieve from diversion-as-reality.