Meet Michael Haight | Artist & Art Handler

We had the good fortune of connecting with Michael Haight and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Michael, how has your work-life balance changed over time?
My work life balance is something I am constantly engaged with. I’m at the end of the exhibition cycle right now, where I have finished the paintings for my solo show and the artworks are at the gallery and the opening is two days away, and I am slowly trying to pull my head out of this stress to breathe and situate myself outside of it in order to stay on top of it. My studio can be both a sanctuary and a swamp, that my wife, bless her heart, reminds me I have to take time away from now and then. Over the past six years, through her persuasion, I’ve learned to take time for myself by utilizing days off from my day job to just be and do things I find enjoyable, rather than spending every moment I’m not at home or a work in my studio. Before I met my wife I was very out of balance and ‘workaholic’ was my norm. I didn’t understand what I was doing to myself and it took the compassion of someone else to hold the mirror to my behavior. Now I understand the importance of accepting if only 4 or 5 hours at the studio are all I need to have a productive day, and allowing myself to go home and rest or do something entertaining. With the way I integrate work life balance now, I see the importance of off time as energizing and an important way to invigorate the concepts I can’t force out by hanging around in the studio stressing. Going back to what I mentioned above, this cycle of exhibitions can cause me to become very single minded which in turn throws me off balance from the necessary relaxation. I see myself spinning towards a dead line like an arrow at a target and it causes me to treat time as ground Im running on with tunnel vision causing me to ignore everything else in my life. But it doesn’t have to be that way, you can walk towards a deadline, and breathe, and be mindful of everything that happens along the way.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I am very excited to be going to New York for the opening of my first solo exhibition in the city. It opens this Friday, September 8th. The work I am showing is part of a series I call “Alcoholic Crepuscules,” that brings together settings from my past that are layered with self-portraits and anecdotes of my coming of age and use of alcohol. This series began in 2017 as a commission for a friend who wanted me to paint a cupboard door he gave me. As I began working on the sketches for that piece for him, I knew I wanted to incorporate ideas about light and how it separates into a spectrum that I’d been having. As for my figures, I like to think of them in abstract terms. I use lines of color to generate the appearance of gigantic frozen wavelengths of photons, shining in their specific frequency; but not without a nod towards an arm, a leg, a finger, or a cloud. This process began to remind me of my experiences of witnessing the sun rise—and specifically the point when it seems the sun shines right at YOU, the viewer. Suddenly, one feels almost as if they’re being singled out by a spotlight. And this jogging of memory reminded me that the majority of the sun rises I had seen in my life were all the product of drinking from sun down to sun up and the places, some of them frequent, where those sunrises took place. Thus the crepuscule, or blue hour before sunrise and after sunset, and its palette, became the motif for this series and it began to infiltrate my other series as well.

There is an ambiguity to the crepuscule that I appreciate, ‘is the sun coming or going?’ ‘did I just wake up or am I going to sleep?’ And the reading of the crepuscule sheds light on the narrative of the action within the artwork. Because of my study of Buddhism, I am very interested in chains of cause and effect, primarily that crepuscular moment in the cause and effect chain where a decision becomes an action becomes a result. Our intentions say it all. For instance, in my series “The Ten Directions” each canvas is littered with horizons that contain bodies I have conjured from reading the underpainting and building abstractions with layers of paint to create forms and composition. These bodies are often right at the point of ambiguity where it is not certain who is giving and who is receiving, or who is teaching and who is learning. This allows the scene to be read according to the nature of the viewer who then takes the simultaneous narratives as a whole or accepts them as what they are, a failed attempt to encapsulate every narrative that is playing out all around us an any given time. Likewise, in the series “Alcoholic Crepuscules” I am giving credence to the comings and goings of my choices and the people around me at the times I describe. I am interested in the my failing to reach enlightenment with alcohol because I erroneously believed enlightenment was something ‘reached,’ or something ‘obtained.’ To the viewer these narratives are subject to their personal understanding of the choices being made and the intentions contained within the multitude of narratives occurring therein.

I am excited to be showing this series at my solo show entitled “And the Sun Rose Regardless,” because it is my first solo show that focuses solely on one body of work and its taking place at a gallery, My Pet Ram, with a great program in an up and coming neighborhood for art galleries. These paintings are all based on works on paper I made that were part of the book “Tension:Rupture” that I made with my friend, the poet Cutter Streeby, in 2020. Published by Tupelo Press in 2021, the book comprises my paintings about my coming-of-age with his observations on his own coming-of-age, of those around him as well as ekphrastic poems based on my paintings in the book. My time spent collaborating with Cutter on this book led me to seek out other writers to collaborate. Thanks to my inclusion in the IKEA Residency I am now working on a collaborative project with the poet Leah Clancy. We are developing a project based on my series “The Ten Directions” which we will be exhibiting in 2024.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
That’s a tough question because Los Angeles is full of that stuff. I think Griffith Park is an important part of Los Angeles because it feels like a giant backyard for those of us who don’t have the luxury. I would take my friend through one of my favorite trails throughout the park. If my friend wanted to chill and have a glass of wine later that day I’d say we go to As it Stands on melrose for something light to eat and a great wine selection. It would be hard to make a dinner choice. I think probably Hangari in koreatown for kalguksu or Öste on third street for pizza. Yuko Kitchen for lunch one day for sure. Coffee at go get em tiger in Larchmont village, and breakfast one day after the beechwood canyon stairs into the Hollywood Reservoir would have to happen at the Beechwood Cafe. If there was something good happening at the Troubadour we’d go there for old times sake. Renting bikes at dockweiler wouldn’t be a bad way to spend the afternoon. As far as art is concerned I think we’d definitely go to the Getty, but not certain we would go to any specific art galleries–sometimes I need a break from the art world.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I think the dedication is to all of my friends and clients in the art world who have come to know me through my work as an art handler and then come to see that I am an artist first and foremost. Being in this industry means meeting the artists, gallerists and collectors that make this place what it is. I see it this way; by helping these people with how they contribute to the art world it has built a relationship of trust between us. Trust allows for people to connect on more than a transactional basis and in turn develops into being seen as more than just a cog. Furthermore this trust causes word-of-mouth and a positive reputation that allows one’s network to expand not just for freelance art handling work, in my case, but also a reputation for what my passion is, creating my own artwork in my own studio. So it is this chain of people and events that is the cause of my success. If I didn’t know any of them and I was alone in my studio doing what I am doing it wouldn’t be known to the outside world. The people in my network that I have come to know and who have come to trust me and my work ethic are my entry point to the world outside my studio.

more specifically I’d like to give a shout out to two people who made my show in New York happen because they believed in my work: Matt Loggins and Cutter Streeby. It was because of Matt Loggins that the series I am showing came to be. In 2017 he gave me an old cupboard door and said to paint anything I’d like on it. And when I sanded the door down and got to work I created a scene from a sunrise on the campus of UC Riverside after, at the time, I had drank all night. That led me to investigating those sunrise memories further to find that I had other situations and settings where the same things happened and I set the tone for my life through them. It was Cutter Streeby who helped potentiate this artistic movement in me because he reached out to collaborate with me on a book project. Upon reading his poetry I saw that my fledgling series on rites of passage and coming-of-age, “Alcoholic Crepuscules,” went with his poetry on his own personal development and observations of people and life. Therefore we came to make the book “Tension:Rupture” which allowed me to go deeper into this series and eventually turn a collection of works on paper into larger scale paintings on canvas.

Website: http://haight.space

Instagram: Haight.space

Image Credits
images credited to Michael Haight