Artist's Bio & Statement

Michael was born and raised in the city of Duncan on Vancouver Island. He began his formal, post-secondary art-education at Malaspina College in Nanaimo, B.C., later moving to Vancouver to attend Simon Fraser University and complete his B.A. in Visual Art.

Well before his formal university education, Michael's artistic influences developed along seemingly disparate lines. For example, he has had an interest in science and mathematics since an early age and began working with computers in the late 1970's, and studied computer science at the university level concurrent to working toward his visual art degree. At the same time he has long been interested in the Bohemian artists of the Belle Époque of 1890's Paris. Michael's continued interest in Bohemianism also manifests itself in his involvement in the contemporary alternative nightlife of Vancouver as a well established event and runway photographer.

Michael has been a photographer in the alternative nightclub scene for nearly 20 years and has run the Gothic BC (http://www.gothic.bc.ca) website since 1998. He is passionate about documenting the intense creativity and variety of Vancouver's "dark" subcultures in a positive and non-exploitive fashion. Gothic BC, featuring tens of thousands of pictures accumulated of the years, operates as the primary repository of this work. His photo-booth is considered by many to be an integral feature of Vancouver's internationally famous "Sin City Fetish Night" since its inception in 2001 through to the present.

Michael's photography has been featured on band websites and album/CD-insert art, and used in magazine, newspaper, handbill and poster advertising. Publication includes the Vancouver Sun, Fiend Magazine (Australia), and Keyboard Magazine (U.S.). His current fine art practice is based around Utopian re-imagining of 20th century Modernism, connecting the pre-Modern to the Post Modern via a "what if?" conceptualization of Modernism.

Michael's paintings, drawings and photographs have sold to private collectors from Vancouver to New York. His on-line portfolio can be viewed at http://www.mbarrick.net and he can be reached at mbarrick@mbarrick.net.