Mike Wrathell
Michael Robert Wrathell (born June 13, 1961 in Detroit) is an American artist, writer, singer/songwriter, and attorney. Wrathell founded The Ultra-Renaissance Art Movement in 1981.
Art[edit]
Wrathell's art touches on many important topics of our age, including the Iraq War, 9/11, Orwellianism in our media, space-themed art, love, and a host of others. Mr. Wrathell's space-themed art sometimes uses NASA photos of celestial objects, which are able to be used by private citizens as long as properly credited as stated on NASA's website. Many of the images are black and white raw images that are artistically manipulated such as "Chillin' On Planet Venus" which was derived from a b + w image of Venus taken with sonar imaging to penetrate Venus's dense atmosphere. Wrathell's "My Favorite Mars Sun" now graces the cover of a new book by Glen Perice entitled "Free Falling in Empire & The Feeling of Structure." The name of his rock group is Blue-Green Audumbla. He has written articles for two online sites, a political site (whose politics he does not always agree with) called Issues & Alibis, and AmericaJR, a Detroit-area arts and entertainment news source. Issues & Alibis is run by Ernest Stewart, who was in a movie with Mr. Wrathell called "W the Movie."
His art is in private and public collections, as well as two films. Bouche Bar in Alphabet City, NYC has on display "Thought Police Tribunal" which won a Director's Recognition Award in the 8th Annual Contemporary Art Juried Online International Art Exhibition in 2006, hosted by Upstream People Gallery in Omaha, Nebraska.[1] Wrathell has a cameo and some of his art, including a collaborative "shang" with Brently Comstock aka B. W. C., are featured in the independent film entitled W, or Strange Things Begin To Happen When A Meteor Crashes in the Arizona Desert, which won Best Experimental Feature at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival in March 2009. Its short title is '"W The Movie." It was copyrighted before the Oliver Stone film on President George W. Bush according to its director, Alfred Eaker. K-Diamondz, a Dallas-based rap artist, is now using Wrathell's "Plutonian Artist" for his MySpace page background, and reported in his blog that Wrathell's art helped him compose some of his songs.
A documentary about Wrathell and his art called The King of Pluto won an Award of Excellence for its director, Sheila Franklin, at the Berkeley Film & Video Festival in 2004, and was also screened in New York City and Indianapolis.
Wrathell's "Ashy," an artwork that satirizes then-U. S. Attorney General John Ashcroft was mentioned in a January 27, 2006 article in the Chicago Tribune about a group show on censorship at The Art House in Oak Park, Illinois. The work appears on the main online page of the Ultra-Renaissance art movement. The show featured artworks about censorship and artworks that had actually been censored. Another artwork of Wrathell's that was in the show is about the Iraq War, and was actually pulled off the wall of Bouche Bar in New York City following customer complaints about its graphic depiction of war and torture. That work, called "Context," is also on the Ultra-Renaissance site.
Ultra-Renaissance[edit]
Wrathell founded The Ultra-Renaissance Art Movement in 1981, which includes other Michigan artists T'Mar, Glen Perice; Minnesota artist Brently Comstock (sometimes known as B. W. C.); Michigan-transplant in Los Angeles, Jim Pasque, and Seattleite Jaimerobert Johnson (aka Crunchbird). In homage to Mr.Wrathell and the art movement,in 1996, Crunchbird recorded an album (released: November 2012: free download at http://www.soundcloud.com/crunchbird)titled "Tales of the Ultra-Renaissance" (http://www.vagrantrecords.com/other/html/catalog/bands/jaime.htm) This full production album included contributions from Seattle musicians such as John Baker Saunders http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Baker_Saunders( Of Mad Season, the Walkabouts) and producer Jack Endino. Other notable participants include San Francisco producer and drummer Simon Grant and Seattle session guitarist Edward Bowley. The Ultra-Renaissance was largely inspired by Devo, Andy Warhol, German Expressionism, and Dadaism.
Like Dada, the name Ultra-Renaissance was created by the artists of the movement themselves, unlike Impressionism, whose name was coined by a French art critic who named it based on a painting by Claude Monet. The term Ultra-Renaissance was put forward by Mike Wrathell and the other artists of the movement have rallied behind it. It is Mr. Wrathell's belief that to lump every artist after the "Pop Art" movement as a "modern" artist or a "post-modern" artist is too general. To say that any art movement after Pop Art is not notable is to possess an indefensibly hostile attitude toward the future of art. Art must evolve and it is artists who ideally will lead it, else entropy and atrophy will take their toll on art itself. The Ultra-Renaissance's goal is to create an ultimate rebirth of the human spirit that will lead us out of our current mental morass with its religious differences, political impasses, and other international disputes that are leading Humankind to a bitter end if we do not embrace the principles of love and rebirth.
- Ultra-Renaissance Sample Gallery
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"Four Mikes"
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"Accidental Man" (Private Collection)
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"Chillin' on Planet Venus"
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"Plontonimus"
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"Dog 2" (Private Collection)
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"Yellow Monster"
References[edit]
- ↑ "Current Exhibition : 8th Annual Contemporary Art Juried Online International Exhibition: Mike Wrathell: "Thought Police Tribunal"". Upstream People Gallery. Retrieved June 5, 2011.
External links[edit]
- The Ultra-Renaissance Art Movement Homepage
- 8th Annual Contemporary Art Juried Online International Competition
- Upstream People Gallery's 10th Painting, Drawing, Photography & Print Juried Online International Art Exhibition
- Upstream People Gallery's 10th Anniversary Best of the Best Online International Art Exhibition
- Review of "the king of pluto", a documentary about Mike Wrathell on FilmThreat.com
- W, or Strange Things Begin To Happen When A Meteor Crashes In The Arizona Desert (go to "Cast")
- Review of "the king of pluto" by independent film director/indy actor/film reviewer Alfred Eaker
- November 2007 ComputorEdge magazine article mentioning Mike Wrathell – "Le Galerie Virtuelle: The Growth of the Online Art Gallery"
- January 2006 Chicago Tribune newspaper article mentioning Mike Wrathell's "Ashy" – "`Censored' lets work be seen"
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