Maggie Michael / Arthur Dove—Depth of Field

For her One-on-One installation, Depth of Field, artist Maggie Michael responds to paintings and collages by American modernist Arthur Dove (1880–1946) in the Phillips’s permanent collection. Michael is inspired by Dove’s understanding of his time and how he recorded weather, landscape, personal relationships, social injustices, and scientific discoveries in letters, paintings, and found object assemblages. Paintings from Michael’s Transfer, Residual, Krakow, and Colored Ground series will be in conversation with Dove’s work. Both artists explore abstraction, which becomes a record of their time alongside works by other artists across mediums. Michael explains, “Depth of Field is as much a nod to experimentation during the process of image making as it is to listening and observing our time and place. Depth of Field can be interpreted as a mechanical function of photography, a philosophical correlation, or a variable distance in physical space with multiple points of view and entry between here and there.” 

The One-on-One series engages an artist to select a work from the museum’s permanent collection and juxtapose it with one or several works of his/her own.