In his new body of work, Michael Harnish cuts out and assembles imagery from contemporary and vintage fashion magazines and botanical books, building relationships across seemingly distant visual genres. Hard, gestural cuts and tears contrast with tonal gradations and deliberately haphazard compositional moves. Harnish’s work also demonstrates a sensitivity to color through his combination of muted pastel tones and saturated fluorescents.He calls his style “California Romanticism” — semi-wild and photogenic landscapes interrupted by tattered street advertisements. In Shangri-La, the works are installed as a montage, reading off each other as color, form, and imagery echo throughout the exhibition. A cartoonish depiction of a Japanese woodblock print is juxtaposed against a pink sky over the ocean at sunset, rich gold and black brocade set off a brushy rendering of a hanging fern, while painterly applications of bold swaths of color intersperse the picture planes throughout the works. The paintings in Shangri-La reflect glimpses of place, memory, and illusion that tell a story unique to the artist’s whims.
