Greene Contemporary is pleased to welcome Mike Solomon back to Sarasota for his April exhibition Sarasota Elegies 1982-1983 > 2006 . 23 years ago while living in his parent's house at Turtle Beach, (His father, Syd Solomon, was the well known Abstract Expressionist) Mike Solomon made a series of works which dealt with his relationship to both his hometown and his artistic background. Solomon was born here in 1956 .
In 1980, Solomon had moved back to Sarasota after attending college in California, to work for sculptor John Chamberlain. A few years later he was to live through a life changing experience. In 1983, Midnight Pass which divided Casey and Siesta Key migrated North due to dredging in the intercoastal waterway and an unusual littoral drift in the Gulf. The quickly moving pass threatened a number of properties South of Turtle Beach, among which was his parent's architecturally celebrated house. In their efforts to try and save the tip of Siesta Key from the meandering Pass, the Solomons, along with Mote Marine and their neighbor Bill Carter (Carter died of a heart attack during the fiasco.) faced a fiercely unsympathetic response to their situation by local officials. The residents were reviled in the local press and their lives were threatened several times. Eventually the Governor himself stepped in and ordered the erosion halted. "Never have I seen such undeserved animosity. After decades of major contributions to the culture of Sarasota, if not the state, this was the treatment we got from the officials in Sarasota, " said the late Syd Solomon, in an interview shortly after the event. Mike had actually handled most of the dealings with the officials and bore the brunt of the insults personally. During this difficult time he privately made small assemblages that expressed his feelings about the situation. The works also dealt with other issues the young artist was facing, including the ambiguity he felt concerning his connection to abstract expressionism.
Solomon's assemblages were made with picture postcards that were available in stores around Sarasota at the time. Typically, the cards depicted scenes of local interest. The imagery provided Solomon with a spring board, he explained, to react to the environment and politics of Sarasota, to what had happened to the area as it was developed from the sleepy and mostly natural environment of his childhood, to the sprawling suburbia it had become. After arranging the cards in various configurations that re-oriented the view, Solomon scrawled on them with wax markers and then scrapped off some of the wax to reveal the photographic imagery underneath. The effect is often ironic, sometimes confrontational, but also quite beautiful, but Solomon never exhibited the assemblages, although a few entered private collections in Sarasota. Solomon left Sarasota in 1984, and put the works away in storage.
With the help of Ghost Editions, a high end digital printing lab in Sag Harbor, New York (which has produced pigment prints of Ibram Lassaw and Jackson Pollock works ) Mike conceived of re- constituting the assemblages by enlarging them through the digital printing process. "Sarasota Elegies" is the name he gave to describe the exhibition because, as he said, "with the perspective of 23 years, I see that I was dealing with the loss of childhood, the loss of innocence."
These archival pigment prints of the originals are about as unique as "prints" can get. First, Solomon has limited the edition size to two, with one set he intends to keep for himself. Second, the effect, because of the size change, magnifies the qualities of the rather diminutive originals. With the scale increase one can really feel the scruffy expressionist aesthetic and the physical action of the mark making in wax. Third, instead of simply enlarging and printing the entire assemblage on one surface Solomon chose to enlarge each card that made up the original assemblages separately. He mounted each enlargement on its own support and then reassembled the prints together, thus imitating the process with that he followed in making the originals. Sarasota Elegies 1982-1983>2006 is an amazing resurrection of works that are both historically relevant to Sarasota, as well as to the artist's career. His current work is also made in layers of wax and under painting. It will be shown next summer with Salomon Contemporary in East Hampton, New York.