Michael Sturtz

Statement of Intent

The influence of the different environments I have been exposed to in my childhood have been an unavoidable presence in my art making philosophy and process. The people within these environments effect my life, which in turn will continue to be influence me in my work.

My fascination with the design and mechanics of machinery was initially sparked by my father's diligent efforts to raise me to follow in his footsteps as an orthopedic surgeon. He would bring home road kill that he would find on the road side (birds, owls, squirrels, raccoons, what ever) and dissect them with me on the side porch. My father would carefully peel back the layers of feathers and flesh to reveal the organs and tissues, always explaining how they functioned within the body. When my father would get called to the emergency room, I would often accompany him and watch him calmly treat his patients amidst the chaos of the Trauma Center.

I was fascinated by the concept of pulling back the skin of things to see their design and what made them work. I applied my father's method of dissection to the broken games and toys that my older brother used to sell me. Carefully dismantling, investigating , and repairing many of these items was the start of my own passion to understand everything within the world in terms of its functionality. It was also an opportunity to sell the repaired toys back to my older brother.

When I was ten, I started working at a close family friend’s auto-body shop, where I would block-sand and prepare cars to be painted; a process which required running my hands along the lines and planes of the car to feel for undulations. I remember hanging out, watching the journeymen tear apart cars to repair them- usually a violent act, filled with air-hammers, wheel saws and grinders. The journeymen would cut-off mangled bumpers and quarter panels, straighten chassis on the frame machine and weld and bolt new parts back on, covering the seams with Bondo.

At the age of twelve, I became a silent observer in the operating room. I would peer over my father's shoulder on a stool as he performed total knee and hip replacement surgery, re-routed tendons from the index finger to the thumb on a mangled hand, and set broken bones.

The surgical tooling was immaculate and beautifully designed. Each instrument had its own specific purpose and relation to the body; sterilized stainless hammers, chisels, clamps, pneumatic dills, grinders, and saws and even an electric skin graph machine were all arranged on white, linen covered trays around the operating room. It was often difficult to remember that there was a living, breathing, anesthetized patient under all of the surgical, drab linens.

All the while, my mother was earning her Ph.D. in psychology, while she supported and raised my brother and me. Her private practice was attached to our home with a separate entrance, waiting room and office. She would emerge from her office 10 minutes before each hour, between patients. My mother has always been a passionate teacher, speaker and conveyer of ideas. I remember, at an early age, being in the audience of a variety of her lectures from the psychology of healing to in-discrepant sexual desire. Her work ethic and approach to interacting with other people is inspiring. I have always been fascinated by her ability to make things happen as a synthesizer of people.

In college I shifted my aspirations to attend medical school for a dedication to making art. I found medicine to be overrun with rules and essential procedures necessary to keep the patient alive. Once I got my hands in clay, I knew I had made the right choice. Working with materials instead of working on people afforded me a freedom of creativity and experimentation that would never be appropriate in any medical procedure. My interest in tools, machines, and technologies was still engaged in my art making process, as well as an analytical, problem solving thought process. Boundless creative possibilities and a physical interaction with materials has drawn me to making sculpture. I approach my work with an intensity and a strong work ethic, because I believe that it can have a function in the world. I see Art as an alternative means of communication; a visual vocabulary that can potentially transcend language, race and culture.

In 1994, I completed an exhibition, that consisted of 20 sculptural works that functioned together as an installation of a natural science museum. Viewers were invited to step into a possible future and investigate what had survived a planet's environmental extinction and how skeletal remains and technological artifacts were perceived and explained by another culture's historians and archaeologists. The show: Remains and Artifacts of a Dead Planet utilized the concept of extinction to physically show what will be left of our civilization. I designed this exhibit to comment on the current human existence which consumes the planet's resources, pollutes the elements, and destroys the natural ecosystems at a rate hurdling toward mass extinction. I wanted to invoke viewers to contemplate a future beyond next week or next year; a global future.

I'm currently working on a exhibition for "The Works" in Alberta, Canada for June of 1999. This exhibition will bring into focus the connection of the human body to the health of the living planet. By contrasting natural functions with industrial and technological processes. How has modern life effected the living body? Can we ever replace the natural with the mechanical? What is the effect of injecting technology into the body or in the planet? Technology in the sense of a pre-computer, mechanical technology. Nature and industry are constantly mixing, the end result is unknown and yet it seems to be the world's fate. My exhibition Into The Body Electric is a transformation of perception, an enlarged investigation of the internal body. Organs, tissues, and body systems grow in size and begin to occupy space in the world as their purposes evolve into functional devices that speak to the current state of existence on this planet.

My work often involves dismantling and re-creating of industrial machines as well as creating new objects and devices from scratch. I have found a useful allies in local industry, whom I approach for access to equipment, donations of materials and inspiration of scale. My studio is filled with tools that are common to a body shop or machine shop, yet the activity often seems closer to an make-shift operating room. Both environments seem to radiate destructive and re-constructive energy that is a driving factor in my working process.