Mic Porter and the Art of Self Loathing
Mic Porter is a Melbourne-based artist who has changed the way art is created across a host of mediums including graffiti, sculpture and painting, to name a few. His style is provocative, with his pieces often taking on grotesque and otherworldly qualities: pock-marked figures resembling fungus, street murals bearing gnarly, sinister caricatures and erotic overtones.
While usually a representation of himself and the emotions he may be trying to expunge during the creative process, Porter’s work is meant to open an internal dialogue between the art and the viewer, despite its sometimes-off-putting nature.
“I guess I like to incorporate the viewer of it and use them,” he told Very Nearly Almost. “Often I’m working from my intuition and I don’t really care how good it looks because in the end I’m rarely happy with it anyway. You know it’s ugly shit but I’ve got to do it. The process is you’ve got to make stuff. Often it is really fairly ugly and you know nobody would want it, which to me is good. I like that aspect of it, it just looks like crap, too dirty.”
Porter began his journey in art at the Victorian College of Art, graduating in 2003 with a degree in sculpture. He then spent eight years working at the Perrin Sculpture Foundry in Cheltenham, where he honed his skills at modern and traditional bronze casting.
Despite this formal education, Porter’s approach veers more towards the spontaneous and eclectic. For one show at Melbourne’s Yarra Sculpture Gallery, Porter found his material, quite literally, on the streets, picking up various bits of trash and refuse along Melbourne’s roads. Similarly, he has made it known that he is not looking to become synonymous with a particular medium, switching up his style if he feels that it is becoming stale or overdone.
His source materials sometimes come from surprising places, with much of his work involving old rubbish, like steel that can be welded, plastic that can be melted or wood that can be screwed or nailed together.
Now, Porter is bringing his pioneering style to Melbourne’s Backwoods Gallery for a new exhibition, appropriately titled Self Loathing. The gallery is autobiographical, with massive totemic heads sculpted from blocks of woods using a chainsaw, as well as some bronze pieces, which are meant to represent Porter himself, much like many of his other pieces.
The sculptures are overseen by three large-scale paintings, which each bear Porter’s iconic, distended faces in a mix of oil and enamel. While each face is meant to be outlets for Porter’s own emotions, they also hold a mirror to society, bringing light to some ugly parts of humanity that Porter has never shied away from in the past. Twisted grins, tortured screams and roughly-hewn details bring forward pure yet complex notions of pain, love and happiness – among whatever else Porter may have been feeling while crafting the pieces.
An essay written to accompany the exhibition points to these shared elements that come through in Self Loathing.
“Each face is Mic’s, but also his family and society’s,” it reads, “he explains that it’s history coming through his face. I think that it’s more than that, I think Mic is so brutally honest with himself, that the self portraits end up reflecting all of us, which is why they’re so alluring and powerful.”
For anybody with an interest alternative contemporary art, this show will not be one to miss. Self Loathing is on display now at the Backwoods Gallery until Sunday 20 August 2017.
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