Crumbs Gather in the Folds: Michael Arrigo

Arrigo’s recent investigations usually begin as simple gestures or routine interactions, often with his family. He preserves these encounters as digital artifacts and displays them in ways that expose the meaning and strangeness immanent in commonplace objects and activities. As an artist, Arrigo thinks of himself as a tinkerer. Cameras document while he takes images, ideas, language, electronics — everything apart to see how it works. He then puts these bits and pieces of mediated reality back together as artworks and projects that reveal the ways in which consciousness is embodied and embedded in its environment, exposing the underlying structures, convoluted folds, and unexpected tensions in the fabric of the everyday. Arrigo makes artworks that reveal rather than conceal his rather messy processes of experimentation, inviting viewers to join him in a spirit of playfulness and shared discovery.