Excerpt from an email inviting a friend to the exhibition held at the Gerald Peters Gallery, NY in 2013. 

Dear James, I’d like to let you know about an exhibition entitled, “With All the Holes in You Already There’s No Reason to Define the Outside Environment as Alien”.  This text by Jenny Holzer was chosen as the title, since it sums up the major theme of the show with little fuss. The exhibition will include a group of plein air paintings made at Mt. Hope in Williamstown, an abstract drawing series derived from field notes made in the Adirondacks, and a large wall drawing based on the light that passed through the birch tree near my studio last summer.  I’m hoping that there is something new to be found in revisiting the sliding plane between realism and abstraction. After painting out of doors for a number of years, I wonder if plein air painting is an enactment of empathy formation and if so, can the genre be reconsidered as a socially relevant performance art in our environmentally challenged time? I need to do more reading in neuroscience to know if this question can be answered, but I can say that the experience of recording and interpreting landscapes is intimate and affirming and that’s what the exhibition is about. A digital catalog with an essay by David Breslin can be viewed here. 

With good wishes, Mike