His 14 Stations is one such project, created in collaboration with men and women transitioning out of homelessness, participating in the Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. 14 Stations is modeled on the traditional Christian devotional rite, The Stations of the Cross, with a different man or woman assuming the role of the Christ figure in each. Group interaction, discussion, and communal meals were all part of the process.
Michalek's oversized black-and-white photos, mounted on back-lit displays have been not only exhibited in galleries and museums, but have also served as the catalyst for interactive performance events in a number of cities, involving the homeless and formerly homeless interacting with the audience and participating in a performance of Bach piano works that incorporates projected stills of 14 Stations. Covering the 2005 exhibit of 14 Stations at The Brooklyn Museum, Art in America said, "Michalek's commiseration with his fellow humans and deep understanding of dramatic figurative representation have enabled him to produce a profound cycle of photographs."
Commissioned to create the images for the film in Peter Sellar's Kafka Fragments, a staged setting of composer Gyorgy Kurtag's searing work for soprano and violin, Michalek, then Artist-in-Residence at The Bridge, Inc., a day-home for people living with mental illness, drew on his activities and interactions with patients to create his compelling photographs. Michalek introduced Kurtag's libretto at the residents' weekly poetry group, where it was read aloud and discussed. Out of these discussions, and over four months of work, he and the group staged and photographed scenes and tableaux for each of the 40 fragments of text that are sung by soprano Dawn Upshaw.
The Los Angles Times, reviewing the 2005 performance of Kafka Fragments at Zankel Hall, wrote, "Kafka Fragments reveals the hidden places where light shines within the darkest recesses of our souls...[and the] photographs by David Michalek connect the musical fragments to suffering in the world and also to the beauty of the world."
In the summer of 2007, Lincoln Center Festival presented the premier of Michalek's
Slow Dancing—a free outdoor,multi-channel video installation of hyper-slow-motion video portraits projected nightly on the facade of the New York State Theater—capturing the beauty of the body in motion by depicting movement of dance icons at 1,000 frames per second. The work was also presented by the Los Angeles Music Center, the New York Guggenheim Museum, "Works and Process," and the Metropolitan Museum of Art where it was part of a program entitled, "Artful Time: Dancing Tableaux Vivants." The New York Times, reviewing the Lincoln Center premier, wrote, "...an unforgetable dance-meets-film-technology evening. Each dance contains its own revelation of energy, phrasing, stillness and style; and the juxtaposition, different on each night, of three simultaneous dances is always enthralling;" and the New York Sun, "this latest item of public art integrates itself into the poetry of the summer of 2007, as well as the collective memories and mythology of New York City."
David Michalek earned a B.A. in English Literature from U.C.L.A. and also studied filmmaking at NYU. He worked as an assistant to noted photographer Herb Ritts for two years. Beginning in the mid-1990s, he began his professional photographic career and worked regularly as a portrait artist for publications such as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Interview, and Vogue. Concurrently, Michalek began experimenting with performance and installation, and developing large-scale, multi-dimensional projects. His solo and collaborative work has been shown nationally and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at Yale University, The Brooklyn Museum, and The Kitchen. He has collaborated with director Peter Sellars on two staged works: Kafka Fragments, presented as part of Carnegie Hall's 2005-06 season; and St. François d'Assise, presented at the Salzburg Festival and Paris Opera. Other film and video work for theater includes collaborations with The Tallis Scholars; John Malpede and L.A.P.D. on three works, Agents and Assets, The Skid Row Museum, and RFK in EKY; and with the Brooklyn Philharmonic in a project for The Brooklyn Museum's "Music Off the Walls" series. Michalek has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, from, among others, The Franklin Furnace, The Durfee Foundation, The California State Arts Council, the Jerome Robbins Foundation, Karen-Weiss Foundation, and the Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County (commission grant toward the creation of Slow Dancing). Beginning in spring 2007, he will be an artist in residence with
The World Performance Project at Yale University. He is a visiting faculty member at Yale Divinity School, where he lectures on religion and the arts. David Michalek lives in New York with his wife Wendy Whelan, principal dancer of New York City Ballet.
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