Michael Banning’s recent paintings of interiors depict familiar domestic spaces revealed through specific qualities of light. These small paintings are based on observations within the artist’s house and its surrounding neighborhood in Minneapolis, MN. The viewer is invited to quietly contemplate these sparsely furnished rooms and bear witness to the passing of light and shadow. The light that floods these rooms is shaped by the geometric frames of windows, doors, and mirrors, as well as the shifting atmospheric conditions of the seasons and the ever-changing angle of the sun. In many of the paintings, the rooms themselves serve primarily to provide a surface for the substantiation of light. The windows allow light into the rooms, but also admit views of nature and the built environment and hint at the connectedness of interior and exterior worlds. Glimpses of the neighbors’ houses, tress, and sky, offer a greater context for home and mark the borders of interior versus exterior space. While these paintings engage in the perennial artistic challenges of creating illusionary space, volume, surface, and light, their real intention is to hint at the poetic and symbolic world that breathes behind things. Banning was born in Boulder, Colorado, in 1966. He received his BFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his MFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Banning is the recipient of grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, and the City of Chicago, where he lived for seven years.