Michael Watson

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel: Michael, we met at ChaShaMa during one of the Non-Professional Development workshops that Mary Ting and I were conducting. This event was organized by Laura James, an artist and curator from the Bronx. I am happy that we have kept in touch.

Michael Watson: Yes! I remember that evening vividly. It was great to talk with fellow artists about the corruption, abuse and neglect by the art industry against its own. I left feeling very encouraged and hopeful that I was not alone. Unfortunately, it seems things haven’t changed that much even with the Me Too, DEI, and BLM movements. It is sad to see. Though, it was great to connect with you and admire the work you are doing. It has been nice to witness over the years how your practice has continued to flourish in this trajectory.

NDEREOM: You are a prolific creative, and I would like to keep this conversation on just some of the key themes/elements informing your large body of work, from painting to sculpture and performance art. I would like to start with rice. Can you talk about this in regard to specific pieces and in connection to you personally?

MW: I started using rice because I was looking for a material that could represent the body/corporeal existence without being constrained by the human figure. I wanted to illustrate the expansiveness of the body in the fleshly and spiritual realms.

Growing up in a Filipino household, rice was a staple of every meal. You could say our bodies became rice and it was a familiarity I shared with my distant relatives halfway around the world.

In the beginning, I was applying a rice porridge directly to fragments of clothing that I had turned inside out referencing the inversion of skin revealing the flesh within. The porridge stiffened the garments in animated states. I remember getting a comment at the time that the garments reminded them of the holocaust, maybe because of the crude application of the porridge on the surface. Nonetheless, I was intrigued by the dialogue and decided to continue down this path.

As the garments progressed, I started to think about containers. These garments felt like bodies and the thought of just placing them on a white pedestal or concrete floor in a gallery setting felt wrong. My research at the time led me into the topic of funerary practices in the United States and around the world, which is diverse with some even involving rice. I was also strongly influenced by my Christian upbringing, specifically the Eucharist–the use of bread and wine to represent body and blood.

I created a shallow box which I placed directly on the floor. It was the same dimensions as the holes dug for graves in the United States. Similar to how we treat coffins, it was pristine with minimal joints and constructed of a cabinet-grade birch plywood. I filled it with approximately 400 pounds of rice and placed a black suit I had treated with the rice porridge on the bed of rice.

The pristine box felt too constrained, so I took a pickaxe to it and burned it with the rice still inside. I also installed lighting underneath, so it pierced through holes in the plywood surface, illuminating the rice and the suit. The box and suit became an installation titled In the End which was my first major exhibition of the rice work and the first time I publicly displayed charred wood with the rice pattern.

My exploration of rice as medium and image in my work has continued, beginning with the charred rice panels, the Afterlife: Bodies series, which is currently on display at my solo exhibition at Saint Peter’s Church in Midtown Manhattan. In addition to the rice panels, I have also produced several rice performances. One such performance, In Remembrance of Me, uses rice as a connective body to bring people together, materializing the connection we already have to each other here and in the metaphysical realm. I pour a handful of rice into an individual's hand in the audience and ask them to pass it on to the person beside them. Acquaintances are now forever intertwined because of a shared spiritual experience. My hope is that the rice performances are solemn experiences that reveal that we are more kindred spirits than we are foreign to each other.

We are all connected in this life and the next–past, present, and future–ancestors to future generations.

NDEREOM: Many years ago I produced an audio piece entitled Arroz sin Pollo. Rebecca Herman narrated my text and Mark Shoffner recorded and edited the audio. Rice plays a big part in Dominican cultures. Just recently, a family member was staying with me and this person kept making pot after pot of rice. I could see how cooking and eating rice can kindle security and familiarity for me as well as for many Dominicans. Rice is the food item that many of us on the island and here in the diaspora eat in huge amounts (in mounds) at 12 noon every day! Your cultural link to rice comes from the Philippines. Generally speaking, Euro-Americans are not that versed on rice dishes. Tell me…

MW: The most pleasurable part of working with rice is the diversity of the stories I hear from the people who experience my work, because rice is such an important part of many different cultural traditions. I find these memories to be the gracious gift I did not expect, so thank you for sharing yours.

My mother is Filipino and grew up in Samar before meeting my father who was stationed at Subic Bay for the U.S. Air Navy in the late 1970s. My mom rarely made authentic Filipino food while I was growing up, but she made rice every morning. We would eat in that pot all day long. That mushy, sweet, buttery, and salty taste is a true comfort food. I am sure you can relate. One thing that stuck with me and ultimately led to the rice work was a story my mother told me in high school. She told me about going home for her brother’s funeral. It is common for people to travel great distances from other villages to attend funerals. Because of that, each party would make large batches of rice for the journey. When they arrived, they would mound up all the rice on a table and everyone at the gathering would eat from it. When I started to think about rice and the body, I remembered that story and thought about the beautiful parallel between the body prepared for burial and the body that feeds us. They were one and the same to me. What a powerful illustration of life–we become nourishment to the souls we leave behind like rice to the mouth, simple yet exactly what you need to survive.

NDEREOM: Thank you for sharing this story. Death and and dying are central aspects of my work and research and I am surprised that these have not yet been coopted by the art industry like what happened to healing. In your case, your creative praxis treats such subjects with great sincerity, and this is something I miss in a great deal of art today.

I very rarely get inspired by art these days. Most of what I see is self-referential. Boring. Gone are the days when life was intrinsically part of the art, even for people who worked in their studios making abstract paintings. What I see now, for the most part, is a daunting amount of objects for sale that do not hold much meaning. But you make objects imbued with rituals and permeated with energies. I would like to hear about this.

MW: Thank you. I am humbled by your comments and insight into my work. My hope is this meaning comes across in the objects I make when you experience them in the flesh.

Objects and “in the flesh” are operative here. Part of what I am trying to say with my work is that we have lost a connection to both the tactile world and intentionality in what we choose to experience. Early on I decided that I would work with materials that I felt personally connected to and center my practice around rituals that were spiritually informed. Rice became such a material. It is meaningless, fragile, and insignificant, but when you eat it, you will be full. Toss it at the right moment, and it celebrates, mourns, or symbolizes fertility, prosperity, and good fortune. This is the way I sense the power of certain materials, objects, and spaces, and especially living things. If the body is rice, then we are insignificant matter made significant by the great orchestration of Nature or God or however you want to refer to Them, through rituals of birth, growth, and death. Focusing on the origins and cycles of the biological world, I adopt these processes as artistic rituals of making, imbuing whatever material I use in my studio with certain metaphysical energies.

One example of this is Pyre, a series of burn panels I completed in 2017. I laid sheets of plywood flat and covered them in rice and scavenged local materials, including rocks and twigs. I then burned the prepared materials, in some cases letting the fire break all the way through the panel. The process of creating these pieces references the practice of cremation on a funerary pyre in which the corpse is prepared and burned over a construction of combustible materials. The fire produces an afterimage of the body’s destruction that remains indefinitely.

Another example is my break work, such as the American Terrain series. Through a destructive ritual of striking and piercing the plywood with a pickaxe and a sledgehammer, the panel expands and breaks apart. The tattered wood surface and fragments that remain become a kind of resurrected corpse, alluding to the expansive nature of the body beyond the grave and the cyclical nature of life and death.

 Destruction is an act of creation. Death is only the beginning.

NDEREOM: Indeed. Kali comes to mind when you talk about this. Can you discuss your interest in ritual or in creative processes that are fed by the spiritual? This is something that is in fashion at the moment. That was not always the case. Some curators and museums in the recent past would not touch, even with latex gloves, anything that had to do with spirituality.

MW: Yeah, I know! I felt very unpopular the past 15 years doing the work that I do, but I always knew at some point people would come around. Spirituality, or one’s beliefs, are often more essential to a person’s life the older they get, especially when they experience loss or a personal health crisis which we all eventually do. I have to admit it is difficult to talk about my religious influences even though it has a big impact on my practice. I sense a deep resentment from many folks in the art community towards religion of any kind but especially Christianity, but I get it. Many devout yet misguided Christians have said a lot of messed up, hurtful things steeped in conspiracy theories, hate speech and bad politics. They have forgotten the core tenets of all truly loving faiths: love, grace, humility, decency, tolerance, community, hope, and acceptance, to name a few good things. Now more than ever, I think it is important for people regardless of faith to embrace each other's diverse belief systems and find commonality.

Rituals are a constant in daily life, whether that is the Eucharist performed in church by a priest, prayer, or personal meditation. All of life is made up of little rituals–how you wake up, brush your teeth, get dressed, or get to work.

Ritual entered my creative practice because I saw it as a powerful tool for creating meaning through an authentic experience. Art was a byproduct of those rituals. My desire to incorporate ritual was informed by how I believe meaning is made, or perhaps more accurately how meaning is recognized. When I was a child, I used to bury the birds my cat would kill in a graveyard I had made for them. There was no meaning in the activity. It did not guarantee a certain afterlife for them or teach my cat a lesson. Perhaps, in my fantasy they would be happier together, dead, but I wanted to preserve them and honor their bodies. At a young age I recognized that life is precious, and time is fleeting. Early on in my artistic career I felt tasked with being a kind of shaman through my art. By doing so it helped me cope with personal trauma by creating a safe space to be vulnerable for as long as I needed to be. I recognized I was not the only injured bird. There were many more like me. I wanted to create a sanctuary of sorts for all of them to experience physical, emotional, and spiritual healing.

Installation comes to mind as a creative process strongly informed by ritual. Often, the goal with my installation work is to create spaces that encourage the viewer to slow down, be mindful, and connect to a higher plane not by leaving this physical world but by reframing it. In Hollow Head, I filter the artificial light coming from the gallery’s track lighting and capture it in a thin veil of fabric in the ‘hollow head’s’ ceiling, causing it to be formless and immaterial. To experience the work, viewers must crouch down to enter the installation, sit, and look up. This simple action creates a personal connection between the viewer and the work, and it changes their relationship to the space of the gallery.   

NDEREOM: You are quietly and steadily doing work that is compelling and that has its own voice. I am curious as to what keeps you focused when there is so much noise around art and healing.

MW: I chose not to focus too closely on what's going on in the art world or what others think I should be making. Rather, I keep my ear to the ground and understand the needs of the communities I come in contact with, and there are many needs. Beyond the essentials such as food, shelter, and safety there are also spiritual needs that are often neglected because it is not considered important. Just like mental health, our spiritual health is necessary to our survival. It influences where we chose to live, what we chose to eat, and how we chose to operate within society. My art practice is primarily focused on this belief.

If I had to give some advice to other artists it would be to embrace your inner voice and accept imperfection, failure, risk, and incompleteness. Let go and make. Your art practice is one large piece of art and like you, it is open, able to receive, instill and evolve with the times.

NDEREOM:  I can see blue in your paintings and in some of your actions. I kept thinking of Yves Klein, whose creative and spiritual incursions I so much admire. Can you expand on your use of this color?

MW: Klein once said, “Blue has no dimensions; it is beyond dimension.” I believe he was hinting at the metaphysical qualities of the hue. In my latest series of mixed media paintings Perpetual Twilight, I incorporate abstract, expressive painting on paper with landscape photography shot both by my grandfather and by me. I chose to work primarily with blue because its inherent spiritual quality recontextualizes these serene vistas and intimate moments to question the stability of our memories and our need to reorder or fictionalize the past to fit our current selves.

I also explore the belief that after we die, we return to our favorite memory and live it in perpetuity. The process of working with my grandfather’s photography gave me the space to embody his experiences and see the world through his eyes. His photos were taken in Guam, where he was stationed in the 1960s, and on his travels in the American West. The series also includes photographs I took of Strynø, an island in Rudkøbing, Denmark. While there, I was struck by the immensity of the surrounding water in relation to the pastoral landscape. My footing was insignificant to what I could not traverse. The depths of the water became imperceptible, immaterial, and I was on the edge of it.

Twilight is the moment when dark and light intertwine. Similarly in my layered paintings I aim to blur photographs and brushstroke, memory and fiction. As light hits the lowest atmosphere during twilight an explosion of color occurs, marked by pink clouds and golden light. This display of warmth is followed by cooler tones created as darkness consumes the upper atmosphere. There, deep blue hues are the last remnants of daylight as they overlap the vast cosmos beyond. Veiling the universe, blue acts as the grounding intermediary between our footing and the unknown. I use a similar technique, applying blue washes to elevate the similarities in my grandfather’s photography and my own experience of Stryno. Since twilight happens twice a day, it is symbolic of death as a setting or a rising sun, an end or a beginning. 

Sky and Water, the two dominant references of blue in the natural world, aren't actually blue. Rather they are created when light is caught up in molecules to create the illusion of form and depth like a permeable body, an intermediary. This is the closest we will get to seeing the soul of the world.

NDEREOM: Do you have any religious or spiritual practice(s)? It has been implied in artistic and academic circles that one could not possibly be an artist or an intellectual and acknowledge a higher power. I would say to that, “Give me a break”. While looking at your work, I see the sacred arising from it, like a mist.

MW: My upbringing in the church, coupled with the stories that my mother would tell me about the Philippines, was a big influence on the person that I became. Western religion and Filipino mysticism formed early personal ideologies that were rooted in specific dogmas, traditions, and rituals. As I got older, I became more interested in eastern philosophies coupled with phenomenology, metaphysics and otherworldliness. All were framed by perceived cultural and personal trauma and a perceptiveness of others’ grief and pain. My art attempts to distill that complex narrative. Although I am part of a faith community, I also see my art as an extension of that spiritual practice.

Spirituality is our relationship with powers and forces outside of ourselves that we recognize driving a larger movement and connecting us together. I believe this higher power is the driving force and connective spiritual body behind all things and all energies. It is in all aspects of an individual’s soul and being, which is connected to all of humanity, nature, and the cosmos. Our relationship with It shapes our everyday life. You cannot just partially obtain or compartmentalize the soul. Your spirituality must be pursued, maintained, and cultivated or you will suffer a soul death. The soul is our tether to the higher power. It is an open line of communication. Helping us to understand who we are and our place in this world. In life, our souls need to be nourished. Each person’s soul is unique. I believe it was with us before we were born, and it will be with us after we die. This brief intermingling of the spirit and the flesh is a necessary component of human experience. The body needs the soul to connect to God, but the soul needs the body to connect to the world. Many in positions of power don’t believe or practice this truth. You see it in our politics right now. You have individuals in positions of power that are not in any way tapped into the currents of humanity. They are unable to perceive real needs. They are not in the position to cure societal ailments. I think art is an important conduit for spiritual nourishment, and I hope my work can help fill that need.

NDEREOM: Thank you for this moment together.

MW: I really enjoyed the opportunity to share some of the meaning and processes behind my work with you. Thank you!

All images and videos courtesy of Michael Watson / Portrait of Michel Watson: Giovana Schluter Nunes

Michael Watson’s links: Website / Instagram

Michael Watson’s process-based paintings, sculptures, installations, and performance embrace destructive and regenerative processes relying on experimental modes of production such as improvisation, destabilization, and chance. He engages with found objects and natural materials such as plywood, rice, and fire to mine the interstitial spaces of being, substance, and imperceptibility.

Watson’s work has been widely exhibited including the Affordable Art Fair (forthcoming, 2025); Afterlife: Bodies at the Narthex Gallery, Saint Peter’s Church in Midtown (solo exhibition, current); Perpetual Twilight at Established Gallery, Brooklyn (solo exhibition, 2024); SPRING BREAK Art Show (2024); Greenville Museum of Art; Hunterdon Art Museum, NJ; Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, NY; Brooklyn Museum; SOMArts Cultural Center, San Francisco, CA; Ideas City Festival via AiOP affiliated with The New Museum; The Kitchen, NYC; Governor’s Island Art Fair, NYC; and the Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN. His commissions can be found in Dior, Cheval Blanc Paris, and several residential projects throughout the world. He has attended residencies at Arts, Letters and Numbers, Averill Park NY; AIR Program 4heads Organization, NYC; and the New York Studio Program, NYC. His work is featured in several publications including The Seeds of Creation: Art and Spirituality by Cosmina Ene, Gwan Anthology: Volume Two by Forward Comix, and The Seeds of Creation: Artists During the 2020 Pandemic by Cosmina Ene. Watson is currently in the Chashama studio program in Brooklyn, New York.

Watson received an MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design and a BFA in Painting from the Art Academy of Cincinnati.