Michael

Background

I was born in an industrial region of the United States near the shores of Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana, its hazy gray landscape punctuated by oil refineries and steel mills. WWII and the Korean War were over and, according to the newspapers and magazines; the US was enjoying a return to the prosperous nuclear family. The US government continued to test nuclear weapons by blowing up chunks of Nevada and Utah, Senator McCarthy was formally censured, and there were rumblings of the civil rights movements to come. Richard Feynman was delivering his famous lectures on physics and Kurt Gödel was exploring the interconnectedness of mathematics and language. The heyday of bold Abstract Expressionist artists like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline were giving way to artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein who were getting groovy with color and graphics in their Pop Art creations. I was a little kid and mostly unaware of these events.

My little brother and I lived with our mother and grandmother in a series of rentals. My mother worked as a switchboard operator, and my grandmother helped raise us. My grandmother was an avid gardener and, in defiance of the transient nature of our housing, would don her straw gardening hat and get her hands in the dirt. Dim, lifeless corners of yards that were not ours would fill with nodding yellow blossoms. Lilies of the valley, a favorite from her and my mother’s French homeland, would perfume the air and soften the stench from the refineries. One apartment had an ancient crabapple tree that rained petals in spring, made summer sunlight sparkle under its canopy, and dropped tiny sour apples that squished and slipped under my sneakers. My grandmother moved lightly and joyfully in these liminal spaces. She never sat me down to teach me her philosophy of connection to nature, but I absorbed it all. Without being conscious of this, I learned the importance of balance in all things, and that beauty and ugliness aren’t opposites, but exist in partnership. Where most people saw mud and rock, she saw possibility and the chance for change. While our moves to other dwellings meant that we did not always get to see those changes, they were no less real. I carried with me a connection to those spaces I no longer saw and those connections changed me. My grandmother also gifted me the ability to notice the rhythm of the seasons, and I’ve carried that gift throughout my life.

My fascination with the layers, connections, and meanings between things started early on, and thus my internal life has always been rich and unconventional. It was never enough for me to memorize a fact. I needed the how. I needed to understand. My mother and grandmother did not stifle my curiosity; instead, they encouraged me to ask and explore. As an adult, I sometimes wonder what they thought of six-year-old me, refusing to accept the status quo and choosing my own intellectual path as I speculated about the big mysteries such as the possible existence of Jesus on other planets and what that might mean both philosophically and within the context of what I learned in Sunday school.

Luckily my little brother was just as curious about the world as I, and also thrived when allowed to let his creativity run free. We liked playing board games, but often grew bored with the limited nature of game play. Thus, using existing games as a spring board, we crafted our own games. In this way we explored planets, created our own languages, and aided dinosaurs in re-conquering the world.

 




Background (cont.)

School seemed like a likely place to find answers to my endless questions, but I often found myself bored and unsatisfied with the static curriculum. Instead of giving up, I chose my own intellectual adventures. I did what was expected in class, but while on my own time I peered through microscopes and discovered whole ecosystems within tiny drops of water, and gazed through telescopes and wondered at the vastness of the universe. I mused about what might exist just outside of my enhanced but still finite view. Well before I took my first chemistry class I checked out a chemistry book from the local library and learned about atoms; my neurons crackled as I imagined the orbits of electrons. 

When I was in junior high school, I went to the Art Institute of Chicago and was first exposed to abstract art. I stood in front of huge pieces by Pollock and Rothko that didn’t look like anything, but contained the possibility of everything. The work felt wild and untethered. And, in its non-representational nature, profound.  It felt spiritual and like something beyond the language of science. I couldn’t explain it but I knew it mattered deeply.

As I pondered flowers and electrons, riotous paint splatters, and Sunday School lessons, I yearned to know where I fit into all of this complexity. There were things that were seen and things that were unseen, some explained by science and some more nebulous. I needed to know how it all came to be and fit together.  The more I observed, the more I read, and the more I pondered, it seemed that the language underpinning much of this was math. Everything I learned seemed to open more doors and more possibilities, and I thought math and physics would be the keys to understanding it all. As high school neared its end, I was naturally drawn to physics as a college major. Given my belief that math was the language of understanding physics, I wanted to know this language and comprehend the profound mystery and beauty of those unseen layers. I wanted to use physics and math to open unseen doors. I earned my degree in physics, and attended graduate school where I studied theoretical astrophysics. As a graduate student I had a paper published in the American Journal of Physics in 1979, and that paper has continued to be cited in other scientific publications over the years. Even as recently as 2022, my paper was cited alongside those by Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Henri Poincaré, and others for a journal article on Special Relativity published through Princeton University.

My studies were fascinating, and I felt that I was doing meaningful work, but academia as an institution felt limiting. There was something in me that felt that I had gone as far as I wanted in that environment. I was excited by all that I had learned. I had gotten the foundational breadth of knowledge that I craved, and felt far better able to understand, theoretically, conceptually, and mathematically, how the universe works. However, I realized the academic path forward that would have taken me deeper into specific targeted areas of research was not what I was looking for.

In a moment of serendipity, I learned that a game company was searching for a game designer with a strong science background, and I thought; yes, this is how I start to bring it all together. Art and creativity utilizing my math and physics background. I thought back to my grandmother and her ability to bring beauty and joy into unbeautiful places. I thought about my little brother and our games, and how play for the sake of play led us to previously unimagined worlds. I had missed play and the joy of unexpected discovery. I yearned for a deeper understanding of my own self.  I knew that when I had sat in that crabapple tree as a boy, petals raining down on me, unseen roots anchoring me to the earth and branches reaching to the heavens, I had experienced something less tangible but just as meaningful. I knew the world was not what it seemed. And now the proverbial fork in the road was right in front of me.

I needed out of academia. I could use my academic background, creativity, and my love of play to build a career. This opportunity sparked something inside of me. It brought forward in my mind that my creativity is what is foundational to who I am and what I need to honor in all that I do in my life. My academic path seemed even more limited when compared to this new and unconventional opportunity.

 




Background (cont.)

During my 30 year career as a game designer I helped produce more than 75 published titles, ranging from classic toys and video games to high-tech amusement park rides, from virtual reality entertainment to massively multi-player online worlds. I even got to work on some very famous products, like Dungeons & Dragons, Spy Hunter, and Cabbage Patch Dolls.

In the early years of my game design career, I continued to yearn for an inward journey, to fully explore the path I started on as a child. I needed to embrace the heretic and do the unconventional. I began exploring more of my ancestry and examined the areas of not-knowing. The Christian teachings I was raised with didn’t resonate with me, and I rebelled against the dogma of the church. I looked more deeply at the lost familial heritage exploring my father’s Indigenous roots, devouring books and considering what this might mean to my experience of myself and my place in the world. I sought the wisdom of Native Teachers, and was honored to learn from Elders of the Ojibwa nation. The teachings were different from the Christianity I was raised with, and filled those spaces in my being that had felt empty. I was also honored to learn ceremony and became a sacred pipe carrier. 

I worked in the game industry until 2010, when opportunities to develop the types of games that fueled my innovative spirit continued to dwindle. I felt spent. I thought about my lifelong passion for art, inspired by my early experiences at the Art Institute of Chicago, and pondered what it could mean to integrate that passion with the technical tools I used as a game designer.  So I stepped away from the game industry and immersed myself in art full-time.  Art became the way to share ideas and stories; to connect physics, spirituality, and consciousness into a cohesive expression via a digital medium.

As a game designer, I had used my passion for creativity, play, and technology to craft immersive worlds for others to explore. Much like building a stage for a theatrical production, I set the stage and created the mood. However, in a play the actors interact on the stage following a set script performance after performance. In games, players don’t have a script that they follow. Instead, through their interactions within the game stage the narrative unfolds.  Unique every time the game is played.

I do the same thing with my art: I set the stage, and invite the viewer to interact with it from their unique perspective. My art will mean something different to each person who experiences it.

I am the physicist, the game designer, the spiritual person, the eternally curious. I constantly search for a visual language that is inspired by the theoretical, yet can exist in the world made visible. Art is a way to fully embrace all of me, to journey inward toward new insights and new questions. Physics teaches me that the nature of reality is not always what it seems, and personal exploration of neuroscience and the nature of consciousness reinforces that in different and exciting ways. Knowing that play and creativity exist hand-in-hand, I embrace them and the expansion of my consciousness, and welcome the resurrection of boyhood wonder. My spiritual beliefs provide the thread that connects these aspects of self, and my art becomes the vehicle for expression.

The world is not as it seems
No change is permanent but change is
Nothing is sacred
I am a heretic…

Michael Pierre Price
February 2024

Exhibitions

Date
2024 Jan-Mar
2023/2024
2023 Jan-Feb
2023 Jan-Feb
2022 Dec
2022 May
2022 Apr-Jul
2022 Apr
2022 Feb
2021 Oct
2021 Sep
2021 Sep
2021 Aug
2021 Jul
2021 Mar
2020 Oct
2020 Aug
2020 Aug
2020 Jul
2020 Mar
2019 Aug
2019 Jul
2019 Jun
2019 May
2019 Mar
2018 Aug
2018 Jun
2018 Apr
2017 Oct
2017 Oct
2017 Sep
2017 Aug
2017 Jun
2017 May
2016 Dec
2016 Sep
2016 May
2015 Jun
2012 Feb

 

Exhibition
The Wrong Biennale 2023/24
The Wrong Biennale 2023/24
The Future Of Printmaking
Book Marks
Digital
All Art Arizona
Techspressionism:Digital And Beyond
No Strangers
Redefining The Creator Economy
Techspressionism 2021
Collab #2 - A Calling For Utopia
Call Me Ishmael
All Art Arizona
Plus One
Spring Fever
No Strangers
All Art Arizona
√-1
Hendecagram
Chartreuse @ Chartreuse
No Strangers
Power Of Five Invitational
All Art Arizona
AAG Statewide Exhibition
Baker’s Dozen
free FORM
All Art Arizona
MAPS: Enigmatic Landscape
AZ Artists Guild Celebrating 90 Years
Off The Wall
Conception Arts: Phoenix
No Strangers
NightVisions VI
All Art Arizona
No Strangers
Off The Wall
All Art Arizona
Phinizy Photo Exhibit
Numinous

 

Venue
Online (Techspressionism: Cyberiana)
Online (Techspressionism: Digital And Beyond)
Mesa Community College Art Gallery
Cotuit Center For The Arts
Sandbox Studios
Art Intersection
Southampton Arts Center
Art Intersection
Mesa Community College Art Gallery
Online (Kunstmatrix)
Online (Kunstmatrix)
Five15Arts @ Chartreuse
Art Intersection
Five15Arts @ Chartreuse
Five15Arts @ Chartreuse
Art Intersection
Art Intersection
Five15Arts @ Chartreuse
Five15Arts @ Chartreuse
Five15Arts @ Chartreuse
Art Intersection
Five15Arts @ Chartreuse
Art Intersection
West Valley Art HQ
Five15Arts @ Chartreuse
Mesa Community College
Art Intersection
Coconino Center For The Arts
Sky Harbor Airport Museum
Art Intersection
The Duce
Art Intersection
Coconino Center For The Arts
Art Intersection
Art Intersection
Art Intersection
Art Intersection
Augusta Regional Airport
Firehouse Gallery

 

Location
Online
Online
Mesa, AZ
Cotuit, MA
Melbourne, AUSTRALIA
Gilbert, AZ
Southampton, NY
Gilbert, AZ
Mesa, AZ
Online
Online
Phoenix, AZ
Gilbert, AZ
Phoenix, AZ
Phoenix, AZ
Gilbert, AZ
Gilbert, AZ
Phoenix, AZ
Phoenix, AZ
Phoenix, AZ
Gilbert, AZ
Phoenix, AZ
Gilbert, AZ
Surprise, AZ
Phoenix, AZ
Mesa, AZ
Gilbert, AZ
Flagstaff, AZ
Phoenix, AZ
Gilbert, AZ
Phoenix, AZ
Gilbert, AZ
Flagstaff, AZ
Gilbert, AZ
Gilbert, AZ
Gilbert, AZ
Gilbert, AZ
Augusta, GA
Louisville, KY

 

Type Of Show
Group
Group
Group
Group
Group
Group
Group
Group
Group
Group
Group
Solo
Group
Group
Group
Group
Group
Solo
Group
Group
Group
Group
Group
Group
Group
Group
Group
Solo
Group
Group
Group
Group
Group
Group
Group
Group
Group
Group
Two-Person