During select ARTbreaks throughout the summer, artists featured in the 2023 West Michigan Area Show will deliver talks on their featured pieces, their larger bodies of work, their artistic processes, and their points of inspiration. With works selected from more than 400 submitted entries, the West Michigan Area Show highlights the work of talented regional artists working in a wide range of artistic media, including painting, photography, ceramics, sculpture, and much more.
This ARTbreak will feature artists Elijah Hamilton-Wray and Nichole Maury. Hamilton-Wray’s paintings often incorporate the human form in combination with surreal or unusual elements. He uses portraiture to explore identity and the balance between individualism and social influence. Maury is a printmaker whose work is influenced by her relationship to the concept of “home,” made complicated and sometimes contentious by a life interrupted by frequent movement, especially in childhood. Her work constitutes an effort to rearrange fragmented memories into a semblance of order.
Be sure to visit the West Michigan Area Show exhibition, on view from May 27 to August 27, to see Hamilton-Wray’s painting Don’t Say the Idiom and Maury’s screenprint In Its Place: Stuart.