Memories & Reflections

Showing / December 12th 2025 - January 12th 2026
RECEPTION: Friday, December 12th, 5PM - 7PM
@ SEGUNDO BESSO / 65 Main St., Cold Spring, NY /

“Memories and Reflections” is a series of photographs and paintings created between 2017 and 2025.

MoniQue Michaels’ blend of styles is strikingly elemental, exploring the untouched beauty of landscapes through visual narratives woven with themes of light, water, movement, and happenstance.

By creating these dreamlike realities, she hopes to inspire viewers to embark on their own creative journeys—looking beyond what is seen and into the spiritual unseen. Her work strives to evoke a sense of becoming one with a multidimensional image, rooted in the quiet and simplistic beauty of nature.

On canvas, MoniQue layers, erases, and relayers ink, graphite, charcoal, and acrylic paint, creating abstract works that unfold as textural fields of color and poetic gestures, embracing both action and chance.
Similarly, in her photographic process, she incorporates a layered approach by capturing multiple exposures on a single negative using 120mm medium-format film.

Michaels studied with Martee Levi in Cold Spring, NY, and Frank O’Cain at the Art Students League in New York. She also holds a Certificate of Photography from Santa Monica College in Los Angeles. Her inspiration draws from artists such as Lee Krasner, Pat Steir, Mark Rothko, and Mary Corse.

As a contributor to The New Yorker, Manhattan, and Angeleno magazines, MoniQue has exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; the Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO; the Southeast Center for Photography, Greenville, SC; the Phyllis Harriman Gallery, New York; and many other venues.

She is an active member of the Greenwich Arts Council and has previously been a member of the American Society of Media Photographers, American Photographic Artists, Advertising Photographers of America, and the Press Photographers Association of Greater Los Angeles.

Additionally, she served on the Board of Directors for the MOCA Contemporaries in Los Angeles from 2011 to 2013 and was a member of the Guggenheim Young Collectors Council from 2014 to 2016.

Born and raised in Chicago, MoniQue lived and worked as an artist in Venice, CA for over a decade and now resides in New York.

MoniQue Michaels / MoniQue@MoniQueMichaels.com
/ @Misspixel