EXCERPT: “how memory : the flesh of our world : unravels”
Michael Haight’s series, Alcoholic Crepuscules, 2017-2021, features fluid, dissolving figures in space that map the physical and emotional terrain of youth. Rendered in watercolor, tempera, and gouache, the scenes he limns recall his coming of age in the streets of California’s Inland Empire where sunsets and drinking go hand in hand.
A fancy word for twilight, crepusucle - as Haight reminds me - can refer to sunrise as well as sunset, to the golden hour and the blue hour. Not surprisingly, yellow and blue figure prominently in his surburban landscapes, and the houses, curbs, and yards he depicts where he and his friends drank. These places have the shapeshifting contours of daydreams and nightmares alike, and while some are based on photographs, they are like palimpsests seen through the shimmer of memory.
The figures that inhabit them have the essence of vapor too, dissolving and forming in response to their environments, and reflecting the transience of their re-membering. The story they tell is one of wild abandon, an adolescent rite of passage familiar to so many, rife with the giddy pleasures of boozing it up, of garrulous insights and outsized gestures. Their hyperbolic, mythic sense of communion is paradoxically sacred and false. These drunken moments are wanly expressed throughout, tinged with the anticipation of what will almost inevitably follow: that ugly reckoning of self with self that can no longer be forestalled by a seemingly endless night. This dissolution is amplified by the wobbly beer can towers his figures build, and the cars they turn into impromptu clubs, none of which were built to last.