Michael Salter

Michael Salter (born 1967) is an American contemporary artist and educator. Salter works in a variety of media, including drawing, painting, digital art, animation, kinetic sculpture, and sculptural assemblage. His work often references and subverts the visual language of corporate branding and graphic design, and reflects his desire to, in his words: "sort out the cacophony of visual noise in order to rethink meaning, motive, perception and narrative." His work has been described as postmodern, whimsical, quirky, unsettling, cryptic, and thought-provoking. Salter is perhaps best known for his giant Styrobots - a series of site-specific installations which rise ceiling-high to dominate their space. Career and early work Education Salter began college as a marketing major before narrowing his focus to the visual and creative aspect of design. He earned his BFA from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, with to a double concentration in sculpture and graphic design. He received his MFA in studio art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Early work After spending some time as a successful graphic designer, Salter became disillusioned with the consumer culture his work was contributing to. As a member of the artist collective Team Lump, in 1998 he began participating in Lump Gallery group shows, creating what one reviewer later described as "whimsical parodies of corporate logotypes and manufactured objects", using the language of institutional-style graphics to "spoof" them. Two years later, he displayed a photo series: discontinuous editing, which depicted uninhabited industrial landscapes. Both the "irrational" icons and the images of unpopulated urban or sub-urban landscapes would become recurring motifs in Salter's work, reemerging in three-dimensional and animated forms in Salter's later work.