Michael Caines is a Toronto based visual artist and
filmmaker. His paintings have been exhibited in
galleries across Canada. His films and videos have
been screened worldwide. In 2005, Caines received a
fellowship from the Chalmers Foundation and an Avery
Fellowship from the Millay Colony for the Arts in the
New York State. His latest film in collaboration with
Keith Cole - “Un Petite Mort”- was an official
selection at the 2005 Toronto International Film
festival.

Caines is currently working on an epic cycle of
drawings for a book, titled Purgastoria. Exhibitions
include: "Cold Comfort", a sculptural installation
with Vancouver artist Leah Decter,shown at Raid
gallery in Los Angeles in 2006; and “Everything”, a
short film screening at "Poetry Projections", a LIFT
event to be held at the Drake Hotel, in Toronto,
October 2005.
Michael Caines will have a solo exhibition at
Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, in April
2007.

Purgastoria:
- an epic cycle of drawings telling a story through
images without the use of text. The roots of this
piece are embedded in the artist'schildhood
realization of mortality, and a desire to more fully
explore my relationship to death.
During the year leading up to the inception of this
piece, the artist experienced a series of illnesses
that led him to consider the fragility of the fleshy
envelope that he inhabits, an experience that inspired
his interest in images of both the demise of the body
and its regeneration.
Underpinning this story is an exploration of epic
poetry, images gleaned from religious iconography,
medicine and contemporary physics.
Epic poems - such as Inferno or Gilgamesh - are rife
with mythical images that record a protagonist
grappling with monsters and deities on the road to
transformation. In Purgastoria the artist utilizes
this approach, creating his own cast of characters to
tell a story through images. He envisions Purgastoria
as the heroic journey of a skeleton, who wakes in a
dark wood and embarks on a journey of regeneration,
eventually becoming fully human. Throughout the piece
he borrows playfully from classic texts. For example,
the first images in this series, where the skeleton
meets and joins with a ghost, are inspired by Dante’s
Inferno, where Dante wakes beside a dark forest and is
led by the ghost of Virgil on his journey into hell.
As well, the artist's readings in physics and math are
used to inspire characters and images, such as the
mirrored cats that are based on the famous quantum
thought experiment, “Schrödinger’s Cat”, that
postulates a cat being simultaneously alive and dead.
An interest in including images from the sciences
stems from two areas: Caine's own internalized fear of
mortality, that often manifests in medical complaints;
and readings in pure and applied physics that stray
into the territory of mythology, exploring notions of
infinity and multiple universes, and in this way
connecting with epic literature. The worlds Caines has
been creating throughdrawing appear to have their
own logic, with animals and humans acting out peculiar
rituals in an otherworldly realm. Purgastoria is
intended to convey a netherworld, a space with shadows
but no horizon. In this netherworld, drawingsweave
together both historic and contemporary ideas in a
marriage of myth and science, while integrating images
from the artist's own history.