MICHELLE FORSYTH



AMO ART, Waitsburg, WA, 2010

One Hundred Drawings

September 4-October, 2010
Opening reception: Saturday, September 4, 4-7 p.m.
Artist talk 6pm.
Solo exhibition, For September Second, opening September 4th at Amo Art, Waitsburg, WA, USA.
[ Amo Art ]

Consisting of watercolor, gouache, screenprint and cut-paper, Michelle Forsyth’s work focuses on subjects often associated with tragedy and loss. Responding to sources that range from photographs of large-scale disasters to accidents downloaded from the Internet, she uses mourning as a vehicle for social communication and overlays accounts of these tragic public events with her own personal and subjective experiences of place.

For the past several years, Forsyth has been traveling to sites of disaster pictured in historic news photographs and re-photographing the ephemeral qualities of each site, focusing instead on fleeting presences and things left behind, such as mattresses dumped in the woods, clouds floating overhead, or wildflowers growing up though the cracks in the sidewalk. Using a compassionate process that is part requiem and part cathartic obsession, she translates these presences into thousands of sinuous loops of undulating color, intricately stacked and cut paper flowers and diluted layers of watercolor. Traces of her own gestures simultaneously test the imprint of her own presence and evoke ideas about memory, loss and grief.

For AmoArt she has created an installation based on the crash of Swissair flight 111. Forsyth traveled there in 2007 to document the site of the tragic event and discovered a grey coastal landscape embedded in fog. Titled For September Second after the date of the accident, her work recreates the silvery surface of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Nova Scotia as seen from the site of the memorial.