Many Days Many Nights: Michael Dillow
On View: September - October 2019
Many Days Many Nights is a body of photographic work that interrogates the concept of place, questioning how identity is both defined, modified, and attributed to a specific locale. It measures the influence of lived-experience, of memory, and of the embodied relationships that form when a place is new, yet familiar. Through the experience of fleeing the wreckage of Dillow's past and starting over in South Florida, he measures the impact that psychological states of mind have on the perspective and the experience of geographical location.
The title of Many Days Many Nights is reflective of a prolonged period of time, as the photographs are the end result of repetitiously traversing the same locations, paying careful attention to what has changed—and more importantly, what has stayed exactly the same. The work utilizes a hybrid documentary practice that adopts ideals from the tradition of street photography and is structured by narratives of searching and longing within a post-paradise. The total work is underpinned by a phenomenological inquiry into the relationship between memory, time, and the experience of place—and collectively, how these concepts pervade the photographic frame.
MICHAEL DILLOW (b.1988) is a South Florida based artist and art educator. He earned a BA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University (2010) and an MFA in Studio Art from Florida Atlantic University (2019). Dillow’s photographic work examines the concept of place, questioning how identities are formed, modified, and attributed to specific locales. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently in the In the In-Between’s group exhibition titled, Another Day in Paradise, juried by Gregory Eddi Jones and Anastasia Samoylova. Dillow was also a finalist in the 2019 Kodak Film Award. Currently, he is a photography instructor in Florida Atlantic University’s Photography Department.