Michelle Forsyth | 100 Drawings Project Since the events of September 11, 2001, it has become more difficult to lurk around disaster sites located at industrial waterfronts, skyscrapers, airports and train stations without eliciting scrutiny from the authorities or locals because doing so arouses a threat of terrorism 1. For this reason, photographing each site without appearing to be suspect provides challenges that generate unexpected results that contradict the signature vantage point that is typical when these places are photographically memorialized and, in turn, culturally remembered. Hurried views, myopic orientations, and awkward perspectives dominate my documentation of these kinds of places in my recent series of work entitled The One Hundred Drawings Project . The One Hundred Drawings Project , when complete, will be a collection of gouache drawings of my experiences within one hundred, historical and contemporary sites of disaster. Although the nature and magnitude of each event covered by my project will vary considerably throughout the series, all sites have fostered media attention and garnered many spectators. As opposed to trying to recreate the aesthetic spectacle that once occurred at each site, like the images that generally permeate the mainstream media, my work documents the absence of it. I began this project in the summer of 2004 when on a road trip to the Midwest. On this trip I documented the site of the Mine Disaster of 1909 in Cherry, Illinois, where a disastrous fire killed so many men that the town ran out of room in the local cemetery; the Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903, one of the worst building fires in history, claiming nearly 800 lives; and the Eastland Disaster of 1915, where an overturned passenger ship claimed the lives of over 800 employees of Chicago's Western Electric Company. I then documented a site where 8 student nurses were killed in Chicago, IL; a 1958 railway wreck in Bayonne, NJ; the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Building Fire in 1911; the Hoboken Pier Fire; and the TWA Flight 800 crash off Long Island. I have also documented two sites in Las Vegas, including the location of the 1980 MGM Hotel fire, as well as the 1981 Hilton hotel fire. Over the past year I have manage to document the sites of two landslides in the Rocky Mountains as well as eleven sites in Eastern Canada that include the Halifax Harbour Explosion (Halifax, NS); and the Swiss Air Flight 111 Crash (Peggy's Cove, NS). I received two grants from the Canada Council for the Arts to produce the first 30 drawings from these travels. Using images of disaster and accident in my work, I have often addressed the human costs involved with living in contemporary technological society. For the past several years my work has focused around a collection of images of trauma culled from television, newspapers, and the Internet. These images include many horrific ones, including terrorist attacks, bombings, massacres and images of war. Most of the images picture individuals, both alive and dead, within these sites of disaster. In North America we are inundated with thousands of dramatic images every day, and as the number of these images increase, the potency of each image is drastically diminished. Many contemporary news sources have chosen to offset this by using images that are more and more extreme in nature. Even without the recent documentations of Hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq or the Israeli bombing of Lebanon, the mass media still pushes daily reminders of the aesthetics of horror. Instead of relying on these threatening visions that highlight the security of the spectator, I hope to expose my grief through a compassionate process of translating the images from my first-hand visits into thousands of tiny, brightly colored brush-marks and glitter. "To grieve," according to Judith Butler, "and to make grief itself into a resource for politics, is not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as the slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself. 2" I am certainly not the first painter to respond to these kinds of horrors, nor am I the first to work from journalistic photographs as source material. From as far back as Francisco Goya's Disasters of War series (1810 - 20), which documents the horrors of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808; and Edouard Manet's The Execution of the Emperor Maximillian (ca. 1867) depicting Mexican republicans executing the French appointed emperor; through Gerhard Richter's suite of 15 black and white paintings of the imagery associated with the Baader-Meinhof gang, who all committed suicide in their prison cells early on the morning of 18 October 1977; and Leon Golub's paintings documenting the atrocities of the War in Vietnam; to the more recent work by Joy Garnett and Adam Hurwitz, the physicality that painting holds has long provided us with means to reflect on the persistence of these kinds of atrocities. According to Susan Sontag, "Torment, a canonical subject in art, is often represented in painting as a spectacle, something being watched (or ignored) by other people. The implication is: no, it cannot be stopped - and the mingling of inattentive with attentive onlookers underscores this. 3" Although I consider my work, as a whole, to fall within this tradition of painting, my work does not rely on the aesthetic spectacle to give it power, instead I hope it will be a lasting counterpoint to the typical manner in which we view traumatic historical events. When selecting the sites for study, I have decided on North American locations because, here, we are bombarded by thousands of dramatic images every day and I feel that it is intrinsically American to use horrific stories of death and destruction for entertainment purposes. According to Jean Baudrillard, "the countless disaster movies bear witness to this fantasy, which clearly attempt to exorcize with images, drowning out the whole thing with special effects. 4" As I find myself confronted by this onslaught, I mourn our tolerance of violence in the media and the inability to express a sense of vulnerability in our culture. See John R. Stilgoe. Landscape and Images , (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005) p. 1. He states, "Paranoia worsens if the observer makes a photograph, even a sketch or a painting." See Judith Butler. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York, Verso, 2004), p.30 See Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) p. 42 See Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, (New York: Verso, 2002) p. 7
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