San Francisco, CA

“While I am making art, I am connected and engaged. I am both within and outside of myself. Art for me is a flow of focused attention and connection with creativity, it feels like the only place to be in the moment.”

Mike Gosbee (he/him/his) describes being inspired by the Dada art movement and has a passion for finding the beauty in randomness, chance configurations, and within the darkness that can often go unnoticed. He describes himself as a very process oriented artist often creating complex work that is done in many layers. Mike is a very tactile artist, he enjoys working with his hands whether he is creating ceramics, collage, ripping or cutting paper, and then rearranging it in a way that makes sense to him. “Abstraction is mostly what I do because it is more about the process and discovery than the subject. I have focused on clay/ ceramics for a long time, but I can work in steel, bronze and wood. The pieces I’m doing now are a result of lack of access to the above, so I try to translate the process to these collage objects.”  

Mike’s “Crop Confetti” collage series is very process based. He first makes a collage using paper from hand shredded documents followed by taking high-resolution photos of the work. Next he edits the images on the computer, creates giclee prints, and then rips them into more shreds. Mike then creates an entirely new work of art with these pieces of his former art from the beginning part of the process in combination with multiple pieces that have gone through the same process.

Mike creates art as a part of Hospitality House, an agency that serves adults in San Francisco living  with homelessness and poverty, which he describes as “my emotional and creative support.” Some of his goals are to sell his art as a way to make a living as well as create large scale commissions. He hopes that his participation with ArtLifting will allow him to be able to afford to create larger scale work as well as purchase more art materials and frames for his art.