Michael Anthony Jr (Mikey) Napao
Bio
Michael Anthony Jr Napao, better known as Mikey, is an artist with a keen interest in digital art, camera based arts, and hip-hop choreography. Mikey’s work often finds itself in the digital realm whether it be documentation for an event or a short narrative expressed in video, photo or digital art. Mikey’s work is often inspired by the opportunity to play with equipment or techniques he has recently learned, whether from school or extracurriculars. From time to time you may find him participating in dance classes in various studios around Toronto.
Mikey was born in Scarborough, Ontario and is currently studying in the Arts Management Specialist Program at the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus with a minor Studio art. He likes to try and involve himself every year with a different school group, and has to date worked with/in ACMSA, Artsideout, ACM Engage, ACM media crew, and twelve65 Dance team.
Common Time
GIF
Inspired by my background in dance, my work intends to explore the relationship between rhythm, and visual association. However, it would be done without the use of any audio. My project achieves this through the use of colour, and shape through the medium of GIFs. In the three pieces, classical, jazz, and Hip-Hop musical rhythms are referenced through composition, colour, and variation.
The piece Common Time, represents classical music, using colours representing piano, being a greyscale and gold; a colour often used to accent grand pianos. Arranged in a square as the square is a defined shape, and easily divided into four. It also has four sides, thus representing the time signature of 4:4, the most common signature in music. The smaller shapes are then divided into smaller rectangles to represent the various notes in music, being quarter, eights, and sixteenth notes. The overall arrangement was inspired by Bethoveen’s Fur Elise, but was the final piece was created listening to a classical music composition.
River Flow, was composed with the intention of recreating a Jazz type of feeling. The colour composition was created using blue as the foundation for the pallet, while the rest of the colours were chosen as they were complementary to the colour. This composition was created without the use of sharper shapes, as Jazz feels like a more soulful, and smooth genre of music. The shapes, and rhythm were created listening to Mile Davis’ All Blue, with each component in the piece imitating the pace of the various instruments in the song.
Dropout, is a piece created to emulate the genre of Hip-Hop. Hip-hop feels more free, thus the composition should be unbound by a defined background shape. It makes use of the shape of triangles, as Hip-Hop and rap music are at a peak in music with the top artists in the continent being Hip-Hop artists such as Drake, and Jay-z. Triangles are referred to as the strongest shape, as such I felt it was the best shape to use. The colours were inspired by the Life of Pablo, album, but also show significance to today’s modern culture as mauve, and neutral tones are popular street fashion colours.
River Flow
Common Time
