Michael Stecky is a Toronto based artist with a multifaceted practice. He earned a BA in Fine Arts from Concordia University in Montreal and has received awards from the Manitoba Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Using repurposed materials and labour-intensive craft, Stecky creates sculpture, paintings, videos, audio works and convergences of those media. His work centers around ideas of collecting and cataloging materials to use in compositions that reflect a distorted nostalgia in its reinterpretation of modernist practices.
Stecky has a strong interest in creating aesthetically compelling objects, using a finely developed and idiosyncratic craftsmanship focused on a refined use of colour, pattern, and movement.
His current work centres on the reuse of jigsaw puzzle pieces to create hybrid painting/sculptures that subvert the expectations or rules about how puzzles are constructed.
The grid-based works of similar repeating elements employ a variety of strategies in both the choice of colour and the arrangement of the patterning, using chance operations, music theory, processed based techniques, and disruption.
The resulting repetitive structure creates both a moiré effect and a dissonance of pattern. The pictorial genre of the ‘landscape’ is re-evoked as tectonic plates, a syncopated vibrating rhythm contained and encased in a minimalist grid.
His work is held in numerous private and corporate collections in Canada as well as the Museum of South Western Manitoba. His work can also be found in private collections in Germany.
