Student artist embraces her instincts

This is what work looks like for Michalak, an art and archaeology concentrator in Program Two, which combines the study of art history with practical training in the visual arts. She finds "elaborate decorations, patterns, glittery and shiny things, makeup and bright colors" and then transforms the images into collages of dashes, dots and diagonals, she explained.

After collaging, Michalak paints. She juxtaposes a finished collage alongside a blank canvas and combines various architectural spaces, people and objects into a cohesive whole.

Michalak cited Byzantine icons and modern painting as the genres with which she most often associates her own work. Similar to fourth-century Byzantine art, which evokes a flat pictorial space, Michalak's two-dimensional paintings lack a distinct foreground, middleground and background. Recalling modern collage artists like Robert Rauschenberg, she strives to make sense of nonsensical space.

Michalak's artwork - currently hanging in the Lucas Gallery at 185 Nassau St. - is intentionally placed as a spatially innovative arrangement of two big canvases between four miniature collages. "To really understand each piece as well as the group as a whole," Michalak said, "you need to start up close, walk away and then come close again." What Michalak does not realize is the immense impact that her artwork's arrangement and thematic content has on the viewer.

Her paintings are both technically and contextually complicated. In the larger of her two paintings, "Interior with Lips," Michalak prevents viewers from fully entering the painting by placing an electric blue gateway before the minimalist interior setting. Through the gateway, one can make out an outline of a small child playing dress-up, an inflamed set of pursed lips and an oval tray holding four wine glasses. It is a fantastical scene; a detached, Gatsby-like reality with vague remnants of human interaction.

Though many people ask about her paintings' meaning, Michalak said, "they aren't intended to have any kind of political or social statement."

She alluded to 20th-century Pop Art as an influence, but while American artist Andy Warhol incorporated images of media and technology to critique the vapidity of modern-day commercialism, Michalak noted that she works solely on subjective taste.

Her art has developed gradually from watercolor and printmaking in high school to collage and oil paint at Princeton, she said, adding that "I've gotten to a point now where I'm very comfortable with the process I go through to create paintings and would like to keep that going."

From here, Michalak will use her technical prowess to focus on issues relevant to her academic interests: She plans to investigate the decline of beauty in relation to urban destruction by studying nearby cities like Trenton and Philadelphia.

Instincts have guided Michalak thus far; with time and deliberation, who knows what creative genius will surface next.