Mike Long
Accidental Documentaries
Frame Shop Gallery
January 10 - March 17 2006

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Mike Long's paintings and drawings are portraits that "document very specific times and spaces that I have experienced in the last few years of constantly moving from one place to another." Many of the paintings combine multiple perspectives that Long has captured on a digital camera, and he wants to "make allusions to digital photography and cinema, as they have had a profound influence on my pictorial sensibilities."

Long's works are often in black and white, even when they are painted. Combined with meticulous detail, extreme and sometimes random-looking cropping and facial expressions, this furthers the reference to photography and cinema. In some, such as Target Ears, the viewer is given only part of a story. The subject is a close-up of a woman in bunny ears, and her costume contrasts with her depressed or desperate expression as she gazes out at the viewer.

Mike Long earned a BFA from Edinboro University in 1997 and an MFA in painting from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2001. He has taught art at numerous colleges, including Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and the State University of New York at Fredonia, where he is currently an instructor. His work was included in the prestigious New American Paintings May 2002 volume, and he has exhibited regionally and nationally, including shows at the Museum of the Southwest in Midland, Texas, The Bowery Gallery in New York City, Sioux City Art Center in Iowa, and here at the Erie Art Museum, where he won a Juror's Award in 2004.