The Hogar Collection is pleased to present Over & Over, new work by Canadian born and Washington State based artist Michelle Forsyth. Her second solo show at the gallery, Over & Over will include eleven new works on paper from three bodies of work including One Hundred Drawings, Ostinatos and Text Work.
In One Hundred Drawings and Ostinatos Forsyth continues her documentation of historic sites of disaster. Instead of relying on images of spectacle, she has traveled to these places and documented things left behind. Fleeting presences—such as clouds floating overhead or wildflowers growing along the road—are the focus of this work. Using a process that is part requiem and part cathartic obsession, she translates these nearby presences into thousands of sinuous loops of undulating color, intricately cut and stacked paper flowers, and minute hand stitches to evoke ideas about memory, loss and grief.
In Text Work, Forsyth has scoured many old newspapers for written information. She has noted many poetic passages that conjure graphic images of their own. Punching quotes from these sources, which include eyewitness testimonies and first-hand accounts, into single sheets of white paper, Forsyth has left us with a lacey absence that provides a quiet counterpoint in this exhibition.
Seven historical disasters bind the work in Over & Over including: The Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse, The Frank Slide, The Hoboken Pier Fire, The Ripple Rock Explosion, Hurricane Hazel, Great Fires of 1947, and The New Carissa Wreck. Forming a historical backdrop for the work, the narrative accounts of each event do not overshadow the work, rather they act as a counterpoint to her own experiences at each site. In this mediation between past and present, Forsyth’s work raises questions about the continued depiction of violence in media-driven documentation of historical events.
Born in Vancouver, BC in 1972, Michelle Forsyth holds an MFA from Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ) and a BFA from the University of Victoria (Victoria, BC). Her work has been included in numerous group and solo exhibitions across north America and abroad, most notably at Zaum Projects (Lisbon, Portugal); The Hogar Collection (Brooklyn, NY); The Hunterdon Museum of Art (Clinton, NJ); The Charleston Heights Arts Center (Las Vegas, NV); Deluge Contemporary Art (Victoria, BC); Mercer Union (Toronto, ON); Third Avenue Gallery (Vancouver, BC); Truck Contemporary Art (Calgary, AB); The Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture (Spokane, WA); and The Kirkland Art Center (Seattle, WA). She has been the recipient of a number of grants and awards including two project awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, a GAP grant from Artist Trust, and in 2007 she was awarded second prize in the William and Dorothy Yeck award for young painters competition at Miami University in Oxford, OH. Forsyth’s work is featured in Carte Blanche, Vol. 2 – Painting, a survey of the current state of Canadian painting
