the color of home 

While living in Atlanta for 10 years, ‘the color of home’ emerged for Mika Munch as a subconscious need to carry home with her. The body of work seeks to explore what we keep with us from place, and what inevitably slips away through abstracted color palettes and compositions drawn from the 

Bay Area landscape. 

Growing up in the Bay, the scenery and land became deeply important for the artist as a way of mindfulness and self-soothing. While in Atlanta, a city in a dense tree canopy, the inability to use her environment as a grounding tool triggered the urge to paint these color palettes. Components of this work are derived from the artist’s childhood playing with her mother’s Pantone chip books under her desk as a little girl, and watching her father paint pastel landscapes. The work marries these two influences of home and childhood as well.

While the vibrant hues and simplified forms may appear cheerful at first glance, they reveal a deeper meditation on nostalgia: the impossible act of fully conjuring what has passed. Through mixed composition of realism and abstract, exaggerated colors and childlike simplification, these paintings try to tap into the adolescent age, moments, and feelings that feel just out of reach. By abstracting color from landscape and elevating it as the subject itself, this figure-ground switch creates an immersive, felt experience of an environment rather than its literal representation.

The geometric blocks acknowledge our contemporary, digital relationship with color and image-making, while suggesting how we now carry and construct our memories. Through the attempt to eternalize a memory on canvas, the works seek to be both reflection on impermanence and present meditation on preciousness.