Carol Mickett & Robert Stackhouse & Shimmer

Florida-based artists Carol Mickett and Robert Stackhouse have worked collaboratively for over sixteen years, gaining critical acclaim for their prints, paintings, and large-scale sculptures. Their work is the product of two divergent backgrounds joined together: Stackhouse approaches the collaboration as an internationally known sculptor and painter, formally trained in the visual arts, while Mickett contributes her expertise in philosophy, film, poetry, radio, and theater.

As the artists’ individual lives and experiences blend together in sustained collaboration, much of their practice—both two- and three-dimensional—is driven by a shared interest in exploring the concept of interconnectedness. Their paintings and prints often consist of several layers of seemingly disparate motifs, strategically stacked upon one another to suggest new or unexamined connections between them. Likewise, many of the duo’s installations are designed to subtly shift in response to viewers’ movements, intimating the constant give-and-take relationship between individuals and their surroundings.

Water is an important recurring theme and an emblem of interconnectedness in Mickett/Stackhouse’s oeuvre. Many of their latest works feature cascading lines, rushing currents, eddy-like spirals, and pervasive, brilliant blue hues, continuing their experimentation with different ways of evoking “the idea of water,” while expressly avoiding literal representations of it. As the artists explain, water is “the substance that is omnipresent and occurs in many forms and many shapes. And yet, it cannot exist alone. It requires architecture or an infrastructure.” Water’s form—its physical state-of-being—is constantly shaped and reshaped by its surroundings. As such, it offers an apt metaphor for the contingent nature of identity and existence. For Mickett and Stackhouse, conjuring the idea of water enables them to explore “how structure or environment or an imposed conceptual scheme shapes our world and us, and how, in these structures, we are nevertheless always in flux—in the constant flow of life.”