Michelle Forsyth
January 18 to February 23, 2008
Opening January 18, 7:00PM – 10:00PM
Deluge Contemporary Art
636 Yates Street, Victoria, BC
Gallery Hours: Wed to Sat, 12 to 5pm
Then & There: Work from the One Hundred Drawings Project is a collection of gouache drawings representing the artist's experiences within one hundred historical and contemporary sites of disaster such as the Halifax harbour explosion, the Triangle Shirtwaist building fire and closer to home, the Point Ellice Bridge collapse of 1896. Although the exact nature and magnitude of each event included in this monumental undertaking varies considerably throughout the series, all have been the focus of media attention and endure as sites of macabre spectacle. Forsyth has chosen to approach these sites obliquely and intuitively, exposing and transmuting her grief through "the compassionate process of translating my first-hand visits into thousands of tiny brightly coloured brush marks and glitter." "As opposed to trying to recreate the aesthetic spectacle that once occurred at each site" she says, "my work documents the absence of it." The drawings favour a formal elegance of pattern and the visceral qualities of the handmade over the efficiency of digital production. Equal parts obsession, devotion and requiem, this work is a reflection on, and powerful indictment of, the onslaught of images of suffering in our contemporary world and the aesthetics of horror.
Michelle Forsyth will be giving a lecture on January 16 at 8:00PM
UVIC, Harry Hickman Building, Room 105
www.michelleforsyth.com