Louis Buhl is pleased to present a series of works on paper by Michael Dotson. Using a bright and unnatural color palette, Dotson transforms pop culture motifs into psychedelic compositions that invoke a child-like imagination while confronting our fascination with the unknown. The series is titled Close Encounter, each piece assigned a number and letter designation so as to unite the community of ghostly aliens rather than have them exist as singular entities.

It was not until the fall of 2021 that Dotson began to incorporate the paper medium into his practice. The works were born out of the artist’s desire to explore the language he had created through the manipulation of found jpegs in a way that was not so reliant on source material: “I was thinking about the shapes and forms of my previous paintings, and wondering what else they could be. I had a vision of these fluid alien forms and knew I had to draw it immediately. I spent my quarantine making dozens of these. Since then the works on paper have become integral to my practice as a painter.” Upon creating his drawings, he scans them into Photoshop to alter them further, serving as studies for what will become larger paintings.