Christopher Michlig

Christopher Michlig is an artist, author, and Professor of Art whose interdisciplinary practice explores the poetics of material transformation, cultural entropy, and the mutable relationship between form and meaning. Working across sculpture, collage, print, and text, Michlig reconfigures found and industrial materials to reveal the social, psychological, and semiotic forces embedded within the built and designed environment.

His book File Under: Slime (2022) extends his artistic research into a cross-disciplinary study of “slime” as both metaphor and material condition - a concept through which he examines the porous boundaries between culture and nature, order and disorder, language and substance. The book has been widely noted for its critical and aesthetic range: Print Magazine’s Steven Heller describes it as “all-consuming as the existential notions underscoring the plot of The Blob,” while praising how it “opens up a wealth of slime lore … and explores how it oozes out into our popular consciousness.” In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Mariella Rudi calls File Under: Slime “a cultural history of slime, tracing a sleek line through art, fashion, literature, film, science, commerce, and beyond,” and Hyperallergic’s Matt Stromberg writes that it is “enthralling and boundaryless,” arguing that slime “best defines our contemporary condition.”

Michlig has presented his research related to File Under: Slime at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. His artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at Alto Beta Gallery, Altadena; 1301 PE, Los Angeles; Nowhere Gallery, Milan; and Devening Projects + Editions, Chicago.

As an educator, Michlig is recognized for his innovative and experimental pedagogy, emphasizing critical making, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the integration of emerging technologies into studio practice. His teaching fosters curiosity, rigor, and conceptual clarity — guiding students to develop materially inventive works that engage the complexities of contemporary visual culture. Michlig received his MFA from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, and he is currently Professor of Art and Faculty Fellow at the Clark Honors College within the University of Oregon’s College of Design.