The Partitioning of the High Country by Michael Southern
- Title: The Partitioning of the High Country
- Artist: Michael Southern
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Creation date: 2015
- Added to collection: 2015
- Donor: Purchased by Portland Community College, Rock Creek Campus
- Campus: Rock Creek
- Location: B7/1 Women's Resource Center rm 119
This large painting combines the artist's love of Baroque figurative painting with the New Zealand landscape. He refers to the series of large figurative paintings he began in 2005 as "lost mythologies." ?In his statement to his solo exhibit at Art at the Cave (Vancouver, WA) Southern wrote: "The mythology and storytelling of indigenous cultures, western civilization, and my own amalgams of memory, invention and reflection are thrown into the narrative mix... These new allegorical images are ... offering a way forward and through our current condition. The characters depicted in this body of work are stage actors in a new mythology.?The primacy of the feminine form and feminine power has always been a key element in this work." This work was exhibited in the Helzer Gallery in 2015 and purchased by the Rock Creek Woman's Resource Center in the same year.