Distortions in My Mind: the Photography of Michael Childers

Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present Distortions in My Mind:  The Photography of Michael Childers.  The exhibition opens with a reception for the artist from 6 to 9 PM, July 27and continues through September 7, 2002.

For over thirty years Michael Childers photographed celebrities;  movie stars, rock stars and pop culture stars.  Many a would- be- star has relied on Childers’ knowing eye to shape their image.  Natalie Wood, Mel Gibson, Richard Gere, Anjelica Huston, Dustin Hoffman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Elton John, David Bowie and Dusty Springfield have all reaped the bounty of Childers evocative and persuasive image making.  His earlier work as production photographer for Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre of Great Britain along with his training at the UCLA Film School (his teachers included Edmund Teske, Robert Heinecken and the great Jean Renoir) had solidified Childers passion and gift for capturing the elegant drama of every face’s story.

In a complete turnaround, Childers’ new work, while never abandoning his sense of story, has abandoned the recognizable face.  Using specially constructed movable distortion mirrors, Childers creates an otherworldly landscape featuring what appears to be the human body.  A pair of sturdy dancer’s legs become a waving stream of sepia toned silk.  A simple lovers’ embrace swirls into an elegiac orgy.  Single flower stems interweave into patterns as inexplicable and beautiful as Chinese hieroglyphs.  With the raw material of form and without the assistance of digital technology, Childers has sculpted an entirely surreal physical world.  Through the mirror, no longer bound by the constraints of “real” life, the artist is free to document, image by image, the dream of life itself.