Michael Poulton
Biography

Michael Poulton is a multimedia and installation artist and the founder and director of the Museum of Temporary Art.

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, his award winning work has been exhibited internationally, with twenty solo exhibitions and work in several major public collections and received the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. His art work has been published in The Sciences, the Journal of the New York Academy of Science and many other books and magazines in Canada and the United States. He has also collaborated on architectural glass projects in Canada and Wales, and designed posters, catalogues and other art related publications, for which he also received awards, and been a juror for the Ontario Arts Council's Design Arts Awards. He is past Chair of Artspace, Peterborough, an artists run centre and still actively involved on the board. His art training was in England at the Epsom and Ewell School of Art and the Camberwell School of Art, London.

Gallery Arcturus Curator’s Comments October 16, 2009

In my perception, Michael Poulton’s work is not separate from the space that it inhabits. His enquiry is given shape and direction as it emerges on the walls of the Museum of Temporary Art, of which he is the founder and custodian. This museum/gallery is a repository of interesting objects connected with literature, art and science, a cabinet of curiosities which, in his most recent work, Michael has incorporated into collage and sculptural assemblages. The gallery is also home to decades of drawings and paintings, impressions from journeys taken, down the road a mile or to far off lands. This is the place where he has lived and worked for the better part of his life, it is the place he returns to, distilling those findings into works of art.

An artist tries to make sense of what he sees and to make it visible to others. In this body of work Michael uses the symbol of arrow to draw our attention to the sense of direction that is present in each moment.

Every movement has a direction it is moving towards. We turn to look at something and our gaze is shaped by its direction. In the process of building we start from the bottom and move up, the building itself has a direction. Doorways and windows form the possibility of moving out or into a space. In this body of work Michael has used the arrow to draw our attention to the direction of the gesture evoked in these images. The other part of this work being exhibited is represented by the orb. Wherein the arrow lacks the target that it seeks and is therefore incomplete and dynamic, the orb is self-sufficient, self-originating and represents completion. They are the perfect counterpoint for each other.

deborah harris