New works by Michael Blair on display in stairwell
As part of our ongoing effort to bring original art into the life of our church, we are honored to feature works by church member Michael Blair, currently displayed in the stairwell leading from Channing Social Hall to the Don Krehbiel Music Center. These pieces are part of our continuing art acquisition initiative with the intention of bringing beauty, color, and vibrancy into the hidden corners of our shared space. We believe that art can be a form of ministry, that color heals, and that creativity helps us see the divine in new ways.
Michael Blair is a Dallas-based artist represented by Conduit Gallery, where he exhibits alongside many of the region’s most accomplished contemporary painters. His work explores the relationship between material and meaning and how paint, texture, and composition can both reveal and obscure what we see.
As Conduit Gallery describes it:
“Blair’s work is concerned with the materiality of imagery and space specifically, making work that is not reducible to the concerns of representation or illustrative imagery. His paintings leverage style against material, material against composition, depth against surface, and order against play, to create surfaces that reframe the facts and illusions of pictorial space in a fresh way.”
In his own words, from a recent New American Paintings feature, Blair reflects:
“My recent two-dimensional work has at its center a preoccupation with how material facts are enrolled in its illusions. The medium-sized works, paint and mixed media on linen, employ different strategies to scrutinize their own veracity in describing something about the world. They all, in their own ways, leverage style against material, material against composition, depth against surface, and order against play, to create surfaces that reframe the facts and illusions of pictorial space in a fresh way.“
Though abstract, Blair’s paintings remain connected to the representational world. Their presence in our stairwell transforms a transitional space into one of reflection and encounter. Please pay them a visit next time you’re on campus.
