Michael Webster
Recipient Information
Location
Spartanburg, South Carolina
Medium
Visual Arts
Year of Award
2027
Grant or Fellowship
Southern Artist Spotlight Grant
Grant Amount
$0
Michael Webster responds to the social organization of space through site-specific projects, sculpture, and lens-based media. His work is context-driven and materially attuned, investigating the effects of power on social geography with a focus on long-term participatory projects rooted in the southern United States. He has attended residencies at McColl Center, ChaNorth, Hambidge Center, Elsewhere Living Museum, and Penland School of Craft. He was the runner-up for the 2023 South Arts Southern Prize and was selected as the South Carolina State Fellow.
Webster’s solo exhibitions include Locust Projects (Miami, FL), LIVLAB at Western Carolina University (Sylva, NC), and Columbia College (Columbia, SC). He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from East Carolina University and a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently, he is a member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid GVL and an Associate Professor at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Contact
Email Michael Webster
www.michaelwebsterstudio.com/
Instagram
Drawn Breath, Exhaled Frequencies
Michael Webster, Arsimmer McCoy, and Selina Nwulu
Installation view at Locust Projects
Drawn Breath, Exhaled Frequencies is a transatlantic conversation of whispered resistance and ecological anxiety, framed through a reimagined sonic architecture. Conceived by artist Michael Webster in collaboration with writers Arsimmer McCoy and Selina Nwulu, the exhibition adopts the early 20th-century technology of sound mirrors, once engineered to detect the threat of incoming war planes, as vessels for spoken voice.
Sonic Fictions
Michael Webster
Installation view at Coker University
Sonic Fictions is an exhibition comprised of exhaust pipes, hunting paraphernalia, and fragments of imperialist monuments scattered across a fallow landscape and bathed in sickly blue light. Sound emanates from the components — recordings of insect infestations, ATV excursions, and foley from nature documentaries combine into a multi-channel audio installation. Resting on an elevated platform covered in mud and crisscrossed by tire tracks, each sculpture exists in limbo between life and death, culminating in a natural history of the Plantationocene.
Throat
Michael Webster
Installation view at LIV LAB Watershed Space, Western Carolina University
This site-specific project transforms the building’s garage into a massive throat, amplifying the voice of the individual to the scale of architecture. Referencing a bodily orifice and acting as an acoustic amplifier, the structure mediates interactions between interior and exterior, performer and audience. Both public workshops and scheduled performances were planned with the object over three weeks, and bootleg records found within the upper floors of the hotel building were broadcast again after decades of dormancy.