Human geography and the dualities of identity, belonging, and practice— “O Negative” by Michelle Andrea explores the complexities of multicultural life through layered forms, colors, and scenes. She knows intimately the life lived between and within cultures when you belong to more than one. One of them may feel like home and, in the next moment, a role to perform. In the next, a distant memory.

Early in Michelle’s life, her family left their home of Venezuela for Indianapolis, IN. While they left behind economic difficulty and political corruption, they also left the rootedness of belonging and life within your home culture. Michelle has found and built these roots herself, with greater flexibility and empathy from her experience as a first generation immigrant.

This collection of oil paintings is Michelle’s senior thesis exhibition for her final year at the Herron School of Art and Design at IUPUI. The series combines abstraction, as in “Antiquated Thoughts,” with the literal, seen in “First Generation To Be,” which depicts an image of her parents. At times, the two styles are mixed, like the cheeky “Don’t tell my grandma,” a semi-mythical display that evokes both sexuality and religion.

There is an appropriateness and expectations for a certain way of doing things that exist in every culture. These social constructs define us and our families. Michelle negotiates different ways of moving in the world because she has access to both Venezuelan and American cultures, which she credits for her “rooted understanding for multiculturalism and the importance of bilingualism.”

“First Generation To Be”, Oil on Hardboard.

Her paintings, like cultures themselves, are multidimensional, mixtures of the buried and the easily perceived. Michelle likens this construction to “earth’s geography, its connectedness and its disjunction” that becomes salient in the “general mobility of cultures.” The layered forms of her more abstract works and the surrealistic shadows in her human scenes appear to peel back, like old wallpaper, where more patterns and colors are revealed the more you pull them apart.

“O Negative” will be on display in the Harrison Center’s Hank and Dolly Gallery for the month of May. The exhibit can be viewed by appointment as well as in our online gallery, where all pieces are available for purchase.