Olive Mickens.   Robert M. Mickens.  Jan Kamper.  Mike Mickens.  

    This installation gathers images created by three boomer siblings over several decades and invites viewers to experience them not as isolated works, but as part of a larger visual current. Rather than presenting each picture as a single, fixed object, the work reflects the contemporary act of searching, sorting, and drifting through an Ocean of Images. The work brings together fragments of film, video, television, painting, drawing, photography, doodles, furniture, and design gathered from long careers in mass media and from personal creative practice. Together, these materials explore the uncertain human space where images shape belief, memory, and dreams. A video monitor narrows this expansive field to one thought and one image at a time, echoing the rhythm of conscious days and dream-filled nights. The installation suggests both success and failure, despair and joy, inner voices, personal passions, privilege, freedom, and the raw uncertainty of bohemian life. Together, these images form a fragmented house that is always under construction within our collective Ocean of Dreams and Ocean of Memory. The work is also guided by our mother’s influence. An artist and deeply intuitive creative force, she raised five children with faith, trusted her instincts, and encouraged us to trust our own, even within the pressures and contradictions of postwar American life in New Jersey.                                                                                                  

click above to listen to conversation on Youtube