Acid Rain, Warm Tile focuses on humans’ worsening effects on our ecosystem. The show develops dueling narratives of ways that greed and power are pushing humanity towards extinction, and how communities resist this trajectory. These narratives are a lens onto damage and resilience. 

 

In several of the pieces, human, plant, and animal forms can be seen in eerie landscapes, denoting moral and emotional collapse, deception, confusion, and ecological destruction. Other pieces challenge these themes with symbols of unity and strength, resistance, and reflection. Together they reflect our precarious present.

 

Gestural, painterly mark-making gives the audience a direct line into Michael’s fast-paced process. Michael’s loose and playfully naive style invites the viewer to contemplate their own relationships to the subjects. Michael captures humanity’s folly, and how our solidarity can work to ensure a healthy and just planet for future generations. He paints as a form of visual record, documenting moments in history as a way to externalize feelings of joy, anger, wonderment, and despair, and in an effort to make sense of our world’s trajectory. 

 

The series builds on Michael’s 2022 exhibition, Cathartic Daydream, which grappled similarly with the behavioural psychology of climate change. Acid Rain, Warm Tile combines the titles of two paintings to create a poetic paradox between corrosive and calming, symbolizing the toxicity of our current path and a feeling of unity with all species.