Mike Shultis
The paintings of Mike Shultis explore the abject nature of current American culture and explicitly reflect the inherent toxicity of the average white man.
Shultis creates his works with a wide variety of found/purchased materials: used clothing, glitter, broken glass, rags, beer cans, padding and many other things that he embeds into his paintings, and through the accumulation and insertion of these materials mirror the impulse of American consumerism, in a process that is both performative and reflective.
According to Shultis the artist is like a mirror in the dark, which serves to reflect and condemn the monstrous structure of society, but also to reflect himself and his role in it.
In this duality of the process – in which the spectators contemplate the moods and the beauty of the images, with irony and provocation the artist discovers and reveals the ugliness and stupidity as the driving force of our time.
