Artist Statement
My Flora Series is the result of a progressing photographic exploration of botanicals. I was driven to the subject at first by my alarm about the threatened natural world and a need to depict the richness of that world by a fresh act of creation. Each work in the series is meant to provoke and engage the viewer with a novel way of seeing these natural subjects. I approach this work with a photographer’s perspective of light and reality but my final images are not limited to realistic depiction. I want each of my works to have the effect of both symbolizing and laying bare the essential integrity and beauty of each subject; to transform but obscuring neither wildness nor beauty.I shoot Flora Series photographs in the wild or in the studio, then I mold my images digitally, with a subtle, mottled patina that has an enriching and transcendent effect. I make each limited edition archival pigment print on fine art printmaking paper.
Biography
Born in Ogden, UT, Mikel Covey was an award-winning commercial photographer and digital artist. He attended the University of Utah for Photographic Studies and was one of the first photographers in America to adopt digital technology as a creative tool. Mikel began his career in San Francisco and then in Los Angeles as an advertising and fashion photographer before moving to Salt Lake City in the 1980s. Mikel and his wife, Traci O’Very Covey, were partners in O’Very/Covey, a creative firm with both local and national clients. Among his clients were Rolling Stone, Macy’s, San Francisco Magazine, Dole, Max Factor, Gallo Wines, Architectural Digest, Ballet West, Intel, Novell, and WordPerfect. In 1995, Mikel was named one of the top twenty photographers in the country working in digital media by New York’s Photo District News and several of his images were chosen for the First New York Society of Illustrators Digital Salon. His work received a gold Ozzie Award in New York in 2003 for a series of garden photographs in an article published in Utah Homes & Garden.