April 10, 2025
Written and recorded by Gallery & Curatorial Fellow Tyler McSheffrey
Burn Area: Hillside is an acrylic on panel painting by Micheal Zachary that depicts the horizon line of a hill in Montana that was devastated by a wildfire just a few years ago and is beginning to regrow. Zachary was doing an artist’s residency in Montana last summer when he spent his free time hiking, photographing and documenting the landscape.
Zachary implements a variety of painting and printmaking techniques in his work. He incorporates a mix of pointillism, impressionism, cross-hatching, etching and a special technique called CMYK, a process that digitally breaks up a colored image into 4 separate colors and layers them so they can be mechanically reproduced. Your eyes process the layered halftones as a full color image; however, the closer you get to the image, the color pixels become more apparent and the more ambiguous the overall image becomes. Zachary uses acrylic paint to create this effect on a large scale. Acrylic has the ability to be watered down and have a more translucent appearance that can be layered. He uses the quality of this paint to his advantage as it allows the CMYK technique to maximize its effect. The colors easily layer on top of one another, creating the large illusion of a full comprehensive image, when in reality, it is thin, transparent colored lines layered on top of one another. In order to recreate this technique as a large-scale painting, Micheal had to spend nearly a decade recalibrating how he painted in order for the process to become intuitive to him. Every technical detail he knew had to be tweaked in order to perfect this method.
He was interested in how the ambiguity of the CMYK technique creates a more embodied experience for the viewer. We live in a highly image-saturated world, we are being exposed to images and photographs at an incomprehensible level. You don’t think twice when you scroll past an image online or see a photograph on an ad. Zachary describes them as the “junk food of images.” They’re easy to digest and process, and your mind quickly discards them. He argues that when you make an image more ambiguous, the viewer has to slow down and spend more time with what they’re seeing so they can properly process and digest the work. He calls this process an “anti-social media,” flipping how we conventionally perceive the world around us, and through that, he is able to reclaim what he loves about landscape imagery and painting.
As you take a look around the gallery, take your time to process and decode each work. How can you maximize your experience with the art that surrounds you?