I had not seen Michele's outstanding paintings for some time before I went to her studio a number of years ago. At the time I was working on an installation about the life and work of the American author, Joan Didion. You might recall that Didion spent what she called an "eccentric" amount of time in Hawaii–this was in the sixties and seventies–and I wanted the show to have a stand out work or two about that recognizable but not necessarily knowable place. Michele was the first person I thought of for that chapter of Didion's life. I didn't want an artist who would illustrate Hawaii so much as bring something real to their idea of the place. But while looking at Michele's haunting evocations of her ancestral home, I came across another painting that worked brilliantly for passages Didion wrote about water, an element that always meant so much to her, coming as she did from a dry part of the country (she was born and raised in Sacramento)..

The painting we had in the show, The Temptation to Exist, is a great image of youth in water, exploring their bodies, exploring the elements, and as with so much of Michele's work there is a fundamental mystery about the piece that draws you in. You don't think so much of your youth and body looking at the large scale painting so much as you wonder how Michele was able to create this world out of our existing one. Her imagination takes us places that we didn't know could exist, and the paintings in this current show prove that over and over again. I have so many feelings looking at this work! The richness of history, of "standard" images of Hawaii–hula skirts, leis, etc–that Michele remakes into images defined by a kind of melancholy and textural richness that describe not only the effects of history on brown skin, but the cultural importance of the body, of community. I want to enter the world of Michele's paintings because even though the mystery is there, so is the richness of their welcome. Aloha.

Hilton Als

Born in 1955 in Detroit, part native Hawaiian (Mahele Kanaka Maoli), Michele Zalopany spent her formative years in Detroit and Hawai’i. Her photo-based work is included in over twenty-five permanent international collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Eli Broad Collection, The USB collection, The Walker Art Center, The Carnegie Institute, and others. She has been a guest lecturer at the American Academy in Rome, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Middlebury College, and others. She was a Visiting Lecturer of Visual Arts at Harvard University 2007-2008 & 2009. From 2001-2014, she was an Adjunct Professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Michele Zalopany lives and works in NYC.