OVER AND OVER AGAIN, THE NATURE OF MEMORY
Frances De Vuono
February 3, 2010
[ pdf 40kb. ]

There is something at once both lush and sharp about what Michelle Forsyth does as an artist. In nearly everything she makes—from small works on paper to large installations—she affirms the handmade. From a distance her works often lock into representation, a suggestion of narrative and place, but close examination reveals that the images are made of cutout pieces of fabric and paper, beads stitched to the paper or mounted on with dressmaker’s pins. Many of her most recent pieces have additional layers of prints on their surface. For this, Forsyth begins with hand drawing on film; she then exposes these drawings onto the screens and, like traditional fabric artisans across the world, she repetitively pushes the inks through the screens onto the paper over and over again. This is work that celebrates the laborious.

Forsyth is interested in history, specifically public and private memories of tragedies and traumas. To this end, she makes her images by embarking on a series of activities. For each of the pieces in both the 100 Drawings and Ostinatos series here, she begins by researching an event through archived media; then she travels to the site where the incident originally took place and photographs the spot. Neither the tragedy itself, these well-sequenced steps, nor her conceptually loaded purpose stops Forsyth from additionally reveling in beauty. In all her work (excepting the Text Works) she manipulates our penchant for pleasure, loading her carefully crafted documentations with vibrant colors as if they were tapestries.

In his novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, Columbian author Gabriel García Márquez referred to memory’s pathway towards nostalgia as a disease. Forsyth, born in Canada, at a colder, near opposite end of the American hemisphere, must have a similar feeling about memory and its ability to course through time, mutating and changing along the way. Forsyth consciously photographs a chosen disaster such as Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse, Tacoma, WA, November 7, 1940 years after it actually took place. The artist’s deliberate acknowledgement of years passed implies that something can still be gained by remembering and seeing, as though the geography holds unseen particles of its past. In the studio, Forsyth then isolates elements from these photographic records and breaks them down further into minute units, which she finally, painstakingly reconstructs back into images again. The results are a plethora of shapes and colors with their own abstract logic that initially makes no narrative sense until we move back. Standing close to a work like Hoboken Pier Fire, Hoboken, NJ, June 30, 1900 is akin to having used the zoom function on a digital camera or a computer. It is a pixilated image, rendered into 3-D by its compounded materials, but we only see it as a real place when we move away from it. And that, of course, is arguably the best way to make sense of our past as well. Forsyth’s description of historical events fractured into tiny bits, suggests that memory could be—or should be—a kind of hologram, only truly understood within the context of its many parts.

While it is clear that Forsyth’s pieces pay tribute to the handmade, it would be a disservice not to acknowledge her equally crucial engagement with technology. Describing the early stages of her process in doing research and in organizing her images, Forsyth states that she takes images “culled from television, newspapers, and the Internet…” using a grid, she translates this visual information into the vibrantly tactile work seen here, variously using cotton thread, bits of gouache painted papers, crystal and more. Conscious of the implications between her ideas and working methods, she explains, “The grid becomes a nexus between the bitmapped images [of the computer] and the hand-crafted ones.” Her very language confirms the importance contemporary technologies play in her work, affirming the observations made by artist (and now theorist) David Hockney who claimed in his book Secret Knowledge, that artists have always embraced the technology of their times and that the best ones turn it to the service of their ideas. Forsyth admits that freely. But in her case, she adds “I use technology to slow my process down instead of speed it up.”

This exhibition draws from three different series done over the past four years: 100 Drawings, Ostinatos and Text Work. While both the two former series use the processes described above and are layered with colors, forms and materials, Text Work does something unexpected but utterly in keeping with Forsyth’s purpose. Using the same newspapers and online sources where Forsyth habitually gathers her visual imagery, for Text Work she eschews color and collected material. Instead she extracts the actual words that witnesses have used to describe historical events. She isolates their verbal responses the way she had formally isolated patterns from pictures, taking phrases and carefully punching them into paper. The resulting pieces are made of light and absence. The shapes that the cutout type leaves are a pentimento of text. It is a ghost of meaning and memory. Showing this simpler, quieter series in conjunction with the more layered works makes for a perfect pairing. Edwin (eyewitness) and Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse, Tacoma, WA, November 7, 1940 demonstrate this explicitly because they both deal with the aftermath of the same disaster. But all three series work in a kind of rewarding synchronicity.

Seeing the richly layered Ostinatos and 100 Drawings in conjunction with the spare, punched out ‘imagery’ of Text Works is a deft curatorial move. What the two different visual depictions suggest is that while we tend to understand our past by aggregate information, we also need to remember that absence of data, information and material is an equally integral part of its nature. We need both.

 

February 24, 2009
Brian Grison, "Michelle Forsyth: An Introduction"
Canopy Brochure, USM Art Gallery
[ pdf 324kb. ]

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear that is inherent in the human condition.
—Graham Greene

The origin of an artist’s work is often found in childhood experience rather than in education or influences. It is useful to know how these origins continue to resonate through an artist’s later life and work. Writing in Solitude: A Return to the Self, psychologist Anthony Storr outlines how many artists’ creativity, often in the form of life-long projects, develop as compensation for childhood trauma. This essay about Michelle Forsyth’s art and practice will reflect Storr’s observation.

Michelle Forsyth grew up on sailboats; between ages eight and sixteen she sailed with her family for three months each summer through Desolation Sound off the coast of British Columbia. Unfortunately, for the young Michelle, sailing seemed acutely dangerous and disaster-prone. Every day she expected the worst. Her constant anxiety and watchfulness evolved into daydreamed stories about disasters at sea, forest fires, urban destruction and the end of the world. Novels about shipwrecks and other disasters that her father enjoyed reading further encouraged her imaginary fears. Children like to frighten themselves, but in this case, there appears to have been no escape, and Michelle hated being frightened.

However, the ocean can be frightening. A sailor must always be careful, and always be prepared for, if not actually expecting, the worst. A sailboat is designed for the dynamic environment of waves, tides, currents and wind. Sailing life is often reduced to holding on, watching the approaching waves or shore, and shouting warnings and instructions. Probably the young Michelle and her two sisters always wore lifejackets, a metaphoric safety line to the boat, but no guarantee of security. She remembers having to watch for rocks while her father maneuvered the boat in tight places. It did not help that he was an aggressive sailor who enjoyed sailing flat out against the wind, and liked putting his family on edge with daredevil antics. 

Today, memories of the insecurity of her sailing childhood have evolved into a psychologically and culturally difficult subject and methodology in her art practice. She now searches for a stable balance among her memories, anxieties and craft-like systems in her studio practice to depict the real historic disasters that her work commemorates. Through a kind of voyeurism, she compulsively unravels the personal psychological impact of the dangerous world, both real and imagined, that she was brought up in, as well as actual historic and contemporary disasters she witnesses through television and the media. These concerns supersede aesthetic, craft process and social or political concerns.

Much of Michelle Forsyth’s art prior to this exhibition can be characterized as documentations of secret ritualistic pilgrimages to scenes of disasters, which she experiences obliquely and intuitively. Instead of employing historic photographs, she surreptitiously records metaphors of the site through digital images of mundane near-by presences, such as flowers or clouds, which have no relationship with the historic disaster. The photographs are then translated into thousands of tiny brightly colored, mosaic-like, brush marks, cut paper shapes, found material and glitter, which she paints, or stitches to paper, or pins to walls. She does not recreate images of the disaster itself. Instead, her paintings, empty of horror, are an elegy to the social loss of memory of these events. 

Two works related to the same disaster encompass the full range of Forsyth’s concerns and methods. On June 17, 1958, the Second Narrows Bridge in Vancouver collapsed during construction. Eighteen workers were killed. Michelle Forsyth’s grandfather, who was fishing for crab nearby, was able to rescue several men who had fallen into the water. In the 1990’s the bridge was renamed the Ironworker’s Memorial Second Narrows Crossing, with memorial plaques at both ends.

In the small watercolor and gouache drawing from 2007, Second Narrows Bridge Collapse, Vancouver BC, June 17, 1958, Michelle Forsyth depicts a few small wild flowers near the north end of the bridge. Only vague shapes and color emerge through elaborate patterning to reference the flowers, though they coalesce slightly through squinting. There is no clear pointer to the bridge collapse. Instead, the viewer is drawn into the mesmeric interplay of the carefully applied layers of pattern and color. The historic disaster, as well as its memory, has faded away.

The second, much larger, work is more ambitious. June 17, 1958 (for my grandfather), produced a few months later in 2007, is materially closer to Forsyth’s creative origins in knitting and needlework, which her mother taught her. Based on a slightly different digital photograph of the same group of flowers, the image has been divided into one-foot sections and then gridded. Forsyth organized a replica of this pattern with one-inch thick pieces of Styrofoam. Into the center of each one-inch grid across the Styrofoam she pins several layers of flower-like shapes that she spends hours cutting from painted paper, Color-aid paper, sandpaper, decorative papers, beads, sequins and glitter.  These assorted colors and textures that accumulate on each pin replicate the colors of the photograph in much the way that French Impressionist paintings reduced the subject to a loose grid of colored spots. Once complete the pins were transferred from the Styrofoam to the gallery wall.  

This memorial to Michelle Forsyth’s grandfather’s heroic action during the collapse of the Second Narrows Bridge is closer in materials and methods, as well as spirit, to the installation, titled Canopy, she has constructed at the University of Southern Maine. The knowledge and assurance that her grandfather could set the precarious world right for others, and therefore for herself, must be read as a milestone in her career. Chronic grief as negative self-identity has shifted to the notion that the hard work, both physical and psychological, that she learned her craft methods is a meditation on the lifeline between a traumatic childhood and her mature self, and points to the new theme of the canopy as a source or protection in her newest project.

— Brian Grison
Brian Grison is an artist and writer currently living in Victoria BC Canada. He holds a BFA and a BA from the University of Victoria, and an MA from Carleton University, Ottawa.

 

October 30, 2008
David Drake, "Interview"
Michelle Forsyth: Field Work, Zaum Projects Contemporary Art
[ pdf 48kb. ]

The following conversation took place between the Michelle Forsyth and David Drake via email during the Month of October 2008.

DD. We've talked about connections between your work and the ideas and strategies of the first generation of conceptual artists. Some of those connections I think are quite clear: the "Drawings" continue investigations into the philosophical problem of presence and absence, for example. But other strategies you employ I'm tempted to regard as radically different, particularly the way you approach art-as-object. Your objects are not dematerialized, demystified and stripped of their aura; rather, through craft, you've raised up humble materials (sandpaper, felt), and applied a jewel-like aura to them. You've attempted to re-invest banality with meaning, maybe even mystery.

And, I want to say, these objects you make--these traces of obsessive studio practice, of travel to the sites of used-up disasters--these objects are also unapologetic commodities. They sell.

I say I'm tempted to regard all this as differing radically with conceptual antecedents. In fact, I think this is also an area of connection: that a similar set of interests results in a drive to dematerialize and decomodify at one time, and the opposite at another.

MF. I am really glad you have brought this up. It is something that I do struggle with. On the one hand I am ultimately driven by moving my work along a solid conceptual trajectory yet on the other I get fully caught up in the materials I chose to work with. I guess I was first interested in the spectacular images that these events conjured up in my mind--exploding ships, bridge collapses, burning forests--and that sense of drama is something that can be seen in the way my materials catch the eye, but what I am ultimately thinking about is how I can pay homage to what is left behind. When I traveled to the first few sites I found myself a little disappointed by what I found there. There wasn’t much to see--a few dandelions or some scrap tires--but when I brought my images back to the studio and set to work I just started trying to fill the absence with the accumulation of residue left behind by my working processes.

I think ultimately what comes into question is the photographic document. When conceptual artists began to document their working processes it opened up a new way to represent things that were more ephemeral. But ultimately the evidence was commodified too. The images of this work--and I am thinking of pieces like Robert Barry’s Inert Gas Series, or Michael Heizer’s Double Negative--are often beautiful. Photographic documents of disasters are also aestheticised, but the results are often more spectacular. I am interested in finding an alternative to this kind of photographic staging. And although I use historical photographs of disasters as a starting point, and re-photograph those sites as they are today, I think that ultimately I am trying to seek alternatives to how these kinds of events are remembered. 

DD. When I said you're re-investing banality with meaning, I was initially thinking of the banality of some of the materials you use--the sandpaper and felt, but also the Swarovski crystals, which somehow remind me of a come-on for an item on QVC or the home shopping network. But your comment suggests there are at least two other categories of the banal at play in your work. First, there is the banality of what I guess we could call the spectacle of the disaster (following Debord) wherein every image of horror becomes drained of its power thru endless repetition (the Hindenburg, the Crucifixion, the plane hitting the second tower, the burning Vietnamese girl). And second, there is the banality of the real place where the disaster once was and is now absent. With that in mind, and with your comments on filling that absence, I am now reminded of all those ways we have learned to use the simplest and most banal of materials to enshrine the places of tragedy: the plastic flowers and stuffed teddies wedged into cyclone fencing around the site of the latest school shooting, for example. Is it possible there is an element of that in your work? A knowing use of that?

It seems to me we are driven to memorialize and make meaningful that which already plagues our memories and resists meaning anything. And that the materials we have to work with, whether plastic or platinum, are as inadequate to the task of commemorating these events as our souls are to comprehending them. Which is pretty flowery.

But I think there can be something truly beautiful, touching and human (in an older sense of the word) in the deeply inadequate.

MF. I think that there is an element of this in my work to some extent, but instead of leaving something behind at the scene, I am instead drawing from it. I am certainly influenced by the ways in which people memorialize events publicly. I was living Jersey City when 9/11 happened and watched the second plane hit the towers, but kept running into my apartment to watch it on the TV. It helped me to understand what was going on at the time, but afterward the images were played over and over, which drowned out my own experience. Lower Manhattan was plastered with photographs of loved ones and there were a lot of ad-hoc shrines and candles, which I think was ultimately a more powerful reminder of what had happened. You could really get a sense of grief from it. The first time I saw the empty pit where the towers once stood I experienced a similar feeling.

I guess I see the detritus left at disaster sites in a similar way. What has been left behind or discarded becomes poignant for me. But I also think of my working process as a residue of a repetitive yet intimate manual labor--stitching, cutting, painting, punching, pinning--, which provides a space to think about things. I need to get lost in this way in order to elevate my materials to an elegiac level. It can also be a good way to forget certain things, which is perhaps why I am in the studio so much. I also think about control, about honing my skills, and making my work as beautiful as it can be.

DD. I'm interested in how you would trace the trajectory of your work over the last 6-7 years, from the accident and water pictures, to the paintings and drawings you're making now, and to the text work you've just begun. We've talked before about the role of the sublime in that earlier work (in its fullest sense: a beautiful terror), but also the banality inherent in the source images you were using. How the snapshot, whether of a glittering body of water or the visceral aftermath of a suicide or traffic accident, renders a numb sameness to all the images (especially when seen online). And how your transformation of those images begins to recover the impact (the sublime) the real events or vistas imaged once had.

At the simplest level, I see your current work as collapsing together what was once two separate bodies of work: the water and flower pictures now are the images of accident and death. And the scope and scale of the disasters has expanded from the personal and the unreported, to the spectacular, the historical, and the newsworthy. I wonder if there is a connection here: that in some sense, if the visible scrim overlaying the idea of a disaster is innocuous (a few flowers, a view of a river), then the underlying disaster must be something larger than an anonymous suicide or car crash.

The other shift I see is toward an increasing materiality in your work--to my mind, they have become objects, even if you still refer to them as drawings or paintings.

The newest work I'm least familiar with, so I'm particularly interested in how it might fit with the ideas I've outlined here (assuming the ideas have validity).

MF. When I had first begun working with these horrific images of personal trauma and death, I was pretty unsure about what I was doing. I was initially interested in how they seemed to lose something in their endless repetition--in a Warholian sense--but I found myself staring at these images for great lengths of time and it was pretty disturbing for me. So I started working on the paintings of water. The images seemed much more benign, but when I placed them beside the others there was a striking similarity: they both evoked a sense of distance. Looking back, I think something else was happening too because I was working through my emotions in those water pieces. I think that’s where a kind of mourning took place for me, if you could call it that.

I was also feeling that the work I was making at that time was becoming exploitative in the sense that I was using images of other’s pain for my personal gain. I didn’t want to keep doing that. I also didn’t want to keep making more bloody images. I wanted to allude to the same ideas without being so explicit. So I think you’ve touched on something interesting when you draw a line between the spectacular nature of the disasters I am documenting on one hand and the innocuous “scrim” that I have chosen to work with on the other. I haven’t really thought about it quite that way before but find it intriguing. Perhaps it is because of this gap that I have written the short paragraphs to go with the work. I think the newer text pieces are an extension of those narratives, but they also have a relationship to my Sunday Paintings from 2006.

DD. In your second answer, you said you try to make your work "as beautiful as it can be." I wonder if you can discuss at length, and pretty specifically, what constitutes beauty: for you, for the work, for the materials and imagery you work with, and for your viewers/collectors. 

MF. I think there is a fine line between making something beautiful and pushing it too far, which can quickly move into the realm of kitsch, particularly when you are using things like sequins and glitter to get there. I guess that my statement about a desire for beauty seems to imply that it is my intention to focus on the object alone rather than the process of making it, but I think for me the two are intrinsically linked. Beauty emerges from experiencing a kind of reverie while making; from a place where I am completely engaged in the task at hand; when I get caught up in the loop of a brush stroke, the movement of my scissors, or am taken by a particular color resting against another, and repeat that over and over until I am somewhere else. My process can be like knitting or needlepoint in that way. The objects I make are also very important to me. I want them to be encrusted with process and almost overworked. I have always been fascinated by Rococo and all the violence underpinning it. I think this shows in the work. When paired with something tragic, I think beauty can be extremely poignant.

Maybe I threw in a loop when I mentioned Rococo. I mention it not because it is associated with beauty for me, but it is over the top and almost campy somehow. I am interested in it but think it is kitschy. Like I want to get some hints from it but transform it. I think of my work as an amalgamation of everything I have learned or am interested in. I try to pack it all in there.

I am interested in using beauty to create a place for my viewers to experience a kind of rapture in some way. Therefore, I am attracted to things that could be considered beautiful--or even sublime if you want to put it that way--and perhaps even go a bit out of my way to find subject matter that interests me on a poetic level. Flowers have become increasingly prevalent in my work. I have been seeking them out at disaster sites and have been using floral motifs in most of my cut-paper pieces as well. I think they can speak more directly about loss, both because they are so fleeting and because they are often used as a way of marking death. Manet’s last paintings, completed as he was dying, were of flowers. They are filled with tragedy yet are deeply beautiful paintings.

DD.  Some final thoughts: I think the beautiful (which emerges as the axis of this whole conversation) is a concept we cannot define, but only point to (either literally, or by making images). Your work, in pointing to the beautiful as it exists in situations where we don't expect it, is ultimately investigative rather than decorative--a way of asking what it means for a thing to be beautiful. It is that investigative quality which connects it with conceptualism, and Proust (it is, after all, In Search of Lost Time), and removes it from the actual practice of the Rococo (although I see exactly how Rococo figures in what you do, and have been doing, even back to those very early "King" paintings).

 

02.06.08
Wendy Welch, "History Repeating: Michelle Forsyth translates horror into pattern"
Monday Magazine, February 6th Edition
[ pdf 196kb. ]

Tragedy disguised as beauty. Horror translated into pattern. These are some of the elements in Michelle Forsyth's Then & There: Work from the One Hundred Drawings Project, currently on view at Deluge. Photographs of disasters are the source material for these highly decorative and detailed paintings. We are continually confronted with a barrage of media images depicting human suffering and Forsyth questions the long-term effect this exposure has on our psyche and on our ability to empathize. Rather than merely skimming through a plethora of disconcerting images, Forsyth lingers on a few specific ones and proceeds to recreate, and thereby reinvent, their content. Images move from scenes of disasters to spectacles of colour through her elaborate patterning process.

Forsyth grew up on the West Coast and spent a good deal of her childhood living on a sailboat. She would concoct not-so-unlikely (considering her circumstances) fantasies of being lost at sea or swept up in a dramatic storm. This experience left Forsyth predisposed to speculate on possible impending and real disaster situations. The use of found images (often gleaned from websites such as rotten.com) could appear to be voyeuristic, but Forsyth attempts to invoke the conscientious gaze of an empathetic outsider. While she might have no personal attachment to the particular incidents she addresses in her work, this lack of connection is compensated for by an intense intimate involvement with each photo through an elaborate artistic process--sometimes involving the use a tiny brush made of only a few hairs. But unlike a voyeur who might enjoy looking at images of disasters for the sheer fascination factor, Forsyth takes the process one step further with visitations to the sites of each event she chooses to portray. These "scene of the crime" visits are a way of making depicted incidents as real as possible without actually having been there at the time of occurrence.

A computer-generated grid pattern is layered on top of the photographic image to establish colours and values that are then painted on paper with gouache. A paradox ensues--as the work gets more detailed, it becomes less descriptive. This oblique subject matter gets returned to its literal source with descriptive text panels accompanying each painting. The detail-oriented text leaves you looking for images in the surface that can no longer be found--reminiscent of the photographic visual clues in Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blow-Up, impossible to ignore and yet impossible to define.

Forsyth found that after 9/11, many of her repeated abstract shapes were being interpreted to be Islamic geometric patterns. The work began to acquire unwanted or unintended meaning. It was at this point she created patterns made of flowers. So rather than being an arbitrary design, these new patterns added another layer of meaning in that flowers are often used as commemorations on sites of disasters or death.

Forsyth's most recent work consists of layered three-dimensional cut-out paper flowers attached to the walls with straight pins. This sculptural work has a physical presence that is evocative of the idea of a disaster, as its physicality is both fragile and real. This fragility doesn't come across as strongly in the paintings on paper that are carefully contained behind glass. The sculptures allow the flower image to become elevated from decorative pattern to metaphor for a memorial. Another strength of the relief work is that the images seem to hover over one another, challenging the viewer to attempt to discover layers of hidden meaning in the surface and its shadows.

Forsyth's work encourages us to question how we respond to tragedies outside of our own experience. It also makes us consider the role of beauty in art: is beauty used to anesthetize and make suffering and pain more palpable? Or is it used as a possible form of salvation or redemption for the human spirit? Most likely the answer rests somewhere between the two.

 

September 6, 2007
Carrie Scozarro. "Palimpsestic"
The Pacific Northwest Inlander, September 6, 2007, p. 27
[ pdf 276kb. ]

Gonzaga's "Drawn to the Wall III" (through Oct. 6) has invited five Northwest area artists — Richard Schindler, Kevin Haas, Gina Freuen, Ken Yuhasz and Michelle Forsyth — to create site-specific "drawings." Like the 2004 "Drawn to the Wall II," which featured both 2D and 3D artists, this exhibition displays a wide variety of mediums: from charcoal to paint to ceramics, and even from neon to colored paper, felt and pinheads. The result? An interrogation of what "drawing" means. From the traditional to the unusual, an entire continuum of approaches to drawing is on display at the Jundt.

Parameters for the exhibition are unusual. First, the work had to be done on an 11-foot tall wall in situ (as opposed to being created in the artist's studio and "hung" on the wall). Second, the walls would be painted over at the end of the exhibition. Those were the rules according to Gonzaga director and curator Scott Patnode, who developed the idea for "Drawn to the Wall" six years ago...

The most extreme interpretation of drawing is Michelle Forsyth's "Fluorescence 5 (Flowers for Iraq)," which is mindboggling from any vantage point. Forsyth uses a grid of colored paper, felt and foam shapes on pinheads extending from the surface of the wall to capture, deconstruct and recontextualize images of horror she culls from pop media. Although they must be viewed from afar to be understood... they are intensely beautiful and surprisingly tactile from close up. Standing back mimics the way we view horror — as consumers of the "horror" genre and of sensationalized news media. Forsyth's work reminds us that we're an apathetic audience desensitized to violence.

The visual and conceptual potency of Forsyth's imagery moves viewers past the question of "Is this drawing?" and nudges them to a place that, like the other walls, negates the object-orientation of conventional art. The audience gets to see a "work of art," yet they cannot obtain or consume it — beyond, that is, the experience of viewing and thinking about it.

 

May 23, 2007
Interview with Brian Sherwin for myartspace.com
[ pdf 624kb. ]

Q. I observed your work at the Bridge Art Fair in Chicago- your work was represented by the Hogar Collection. How did the exhibit go for you? I understand that this is not the first time you have been involved with the Bridge Art Fair.

A. The fairs this year have been a great experience for me. In Chicago I included six pieces from a current series of work entitled, One Hundred Drawings. The work has been a real departure for me, overall. I wanted to make something that did not rely on the spectacle to give the work its power, yet still draw from a large archive of images of catastrophe and disaster I had been collecting since the late 90's. Back in 2005 I took a road trip to the midwest and began documenting what remains at the sites pictured in many of the photographs I had been collecting. I started the project by going to sites in Chicago, so I was particularly excited about having some of the work included in the recent Bridge Art Fair. Todd Rosenbaum, the director of Hogar Collection, also took some of my work to the Miami Bridge Art Fair last December. That experience opened up a lot of doors for me and the work reached a wide audience.

Q. I viewed Hope Slide at the Bridge Art Fair. Care to tell our readers more about this piece?

A. Hope Slide is the ninth piece in the One Hundred Drawings project. The piece depicts a site just outside of Hope, BC (Canada) where an enormous landslide covered the highway on the morning of Saturday, January 9, 1965, burying four people in two cars. The highway now snakes around the foot of the slide and when you go out there you can still clearly see the swath of earth that slid down the mountain. Most of the sites I have documented have been places that really bear no trace of the events that have occurred at them, but the Hope Slide was different. I was astonished by how visible the evidence really was. At the base of the slide is a marker commemorating the lives of the victims of the slide. It also lists the names of six people who perished in two separate plane crashes that occurred on the same site. My piece documents a wreath placed at the base of this marker. So far I have documented twenty of the sites and have finished the first twelve works in the series, but I plan to do one hundred of them, eventually.

Q. You have stated that you "use painting, needlepoint and paper-crafts to counter the dehumanization of rapidly transmitted, digital images." Can you go into further detail about that statement?

A. I consider my work to be a reflection on, and a reaction to, the onslaught of images of suffering in our contemporary world. Peril and demise permeates our daily experience, and viewing dramatic events through the screen of a computer or television can often foster apathetic ways of seeing. I find this deeply disturbing and try to seek out elaborate ways of working in order to slow these kinds of images down. They do form a starting point for the work, yet I try to build surfaces that are tactile and intimate so that the viewer gets caught up in them a bit. Tedious brush-marks, dramatic stitches of color, barely visible hole-punches, cutout paper flowers, or diluted layers of watercolor dominate every piece I make in the studio. Sometimes you have to look pretty closely to discover some of the things I have done with them.

Q. Michelle, you have instructed art at several institutions including Pratt Institute and Washington State University. Are you inspired by your students? I assume that teaching art on the college level is a give-and-take of information...

A. I currently teach at Washington State University, which is located in eastern Washington. Living out here is a challenge because I live quite far away from any city. For this reason, I tend to form strong connections with my students and try to share as much information with them as I can. I grew up on Vancouver Island and when I was studying at the University of Victoria I was very involved in the art community there. People were eager to help each other and would work together to put up large exhibitions.

I have been thinking a lot lately about how my studio work intersects with my role as a professor and have been thinking about ways to get the two to come together more. I enjoy round table discussions and feel that craft practices that engage the community to be quite interesting (ie. the Stitch and Bitch). I have been invited to be a mentor at a residency program in Wells, BC this summer, and to be a visiting artist in residence at the University of Southern Maine in the Spring of 2008 and hope to use these opportunities to experiment a bit with this kind of model.

Q. You obtained your MFA from Rutgers University. Care to tell us about the art program there? Who did you study under?

A. Rutgers was a very rewarding experience for me. I worked primarily under Hanneline Røgeberg and Lauren Ewing, both of whom challenged me a lot. I feel that I am just now getting my head around some of the things that they suggested and am finally trying to answer some of the questions they opened up for me. My peers in graduate school were amazing. We had a lot of fun, but we also worked very hard.  

Q. Can you go into further detail about how society has influenced your art?

A. Threatening visions   -- from disaster coverage in the media and television shows that rely on individual suffering for entertainment, to violent video games and websites that display images of death -- surround us. In response to this, I hope to expose my grief through a compassionate process of translating the images 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."  

Q. What has been the toughest point for you as far exhibiting or creating art is concerned?

A. I have always moved around a lot and I have never really felt the desire to set down permanent roots. Although there are many benefits to this kind of flexibility, it is often a challenge to make long term connections. I am often sporadic about keeping in touch with people.

Q. Can you explain some of your artistic process? How do you start a piece?

A. I spend a great deal of time on-line and I guess that is what really sparks the work. Each piece almost always begins on my computer and is usually sparked by some image that I have found on the web. I often have several projects going on at the same time and approach them in various ways, however they are all generated by the same collection of images.

Probably the most elaborate process that I have been working in is one where I translate the images into tiny fragments of cut paper circles and flowers. Entitled Florescence (Flowers for Iraq), these works depict the individual casualties of Iraqi civilians. The images are quite brutal, yet I have fractured them into tens of thousands of pieces that become memorials to those that have suffered from the brutal realities of war. Each piece of paper is hand cut and layered with felt and beads and is mounted to the end of a sewing pin. My paintings begin with a layer of intricate patterning before an underpainting is laid down in watercolor. Together the pattern and watercolor acts as a guide for me to start building up the surface with sinuous lines of gouache. Each work takes several months to complete.

Q. Where can we see more of your art?

A. I will have two upcoming solo exhibitions. One at Hogar Collection in Brooklyn this September and one at Deluge Contemporary Art in Victoria, BC in January 2008. I will also have a cut-paper installation piece at the Jundt Art Museum this August, and you can see my work online at http://www.michelleforsyth.com.

Q. Where do you see your direction of work going next? Care to reveal any of your plans?

A. I just received a grant from the Canada Council to continue my work documenting sites in eastern Canada so I am definitely going to continue working on that project, however I am making the newer pieces much larger in scale. Because I am enamored by complexity and detail as well as extremely elaborate methodologies, I also think I may try to make the work more layered or mottled in their surface treatment.

Q. Finally, is there anything else you would like to say about your art or the 'art world'?

A. 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. " As I find myself confronted by this onslaught, I mourn our tolerance of violence in the media and our inability to express a sense of vulnerability.

 

January 2007
Jerry Saltz, “The War on Terror; Abstract Painting in Today’s World.” Juror Statement, Miami University Young Painters Competition for the William and Dorothy Yeck Award, 2007

There is no such thing as the “War on Terror.” Obviously, we are all terrified of terrorism. But a “War on Terror” is a metaphysical, psychological, technical, and ontological impossibility. “The War on Terror,” as such, is an absurd diversionary tactic that allows us not to address real issues. We all know this in our bones because terror has been with us since the beginning. It was there in the caves, on the steppe, across the savanna, and on the tundra. We will bring it with us to our graves.

After September 11 everyone said that, “Everything is different.” This is exactly wrong. After September 11 everything simply became more of what it already was. Before September 11 America tended toward unilateralism, now it’s more unilateral; we burned a lot of fossil fuel, now we burn more; Islam hated us, now they hate us more. Painter Charline von Heyl recently described the disconnect that many of us are experiencing thusly, “While almost everything in the outer world feels messed-up our inner lives aren’t altogether messed-up.” That sums up the art world as well.

One of the more annoying ideas afoot in the art world these days is that for art to be “political,” whatever that means, it has to be figurative and have “political subject matter.” This is exactly wrong. Case in point: Recently, the curator of Marlene Dumas’ upcoming Museum of Modern Art exhibition, the otherwise excellent Connie Butler, responded to one of my public hissy-fits about the overestimation of this latter-day Neo-Expressionist, by saying, “Dumas has been making portraits of terrorists.” This was meant to suggest that certain subject matter exempts art from criticism or questioning when, in fact, this subject matter is not only predictable and generic, and in that sense utterly conservative, its perfect fodder for a culture in disconnect.

All I want to say about this is: Painting has the ability to change lives and the world, if not directly then by osmosis and incrementally. No one has believed the cliché that “Painting is Dead” since at least the Nixon administration (except maybe the scolds at October Magazine). Yet the art world has a new version of this idiotic notion, namely that Abstraction is somehow ineffective, frivolous, or irrelevant.

In fact, abstraction is an extraordinary invention and an enormously powerful tool in art’s arsenal. And let’s face it: All art is inherently abstract. All art is an infinitely weird, amazingly radical thing that structures a galaxy according to its own rules. Every painting, every work of art for that matter, regardless of whether or not you label it “abstract” or not, is its own theory of the universe. It is a world unto itself. To say that only figurative art can address the issues of our time is not only just another perversely erroneous diversionary tactic, and laughable, anyone saying this must be told to “Go away. We can’t help you anymore.”

In his eloquent essay, “Vermeer in Bosnia,” Lawrence Weschler reports that Antonio Cassese, a distinguished Italian jurist serving on the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, would sometimes go to the Mauritshuis museum after hearing continual testimony about Balkan atrocities. There, he looks at what are among the two most beautiful things ever made, Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1665-66 and his View of Delft, 1660-61. He does not do this because these things are “merely beautiful;” he does this, Cassese says, because these paintings were “invented to heal pain;” “they radiate a centeredness, a peacefulness, a serenity … and are a psychic balm.” In other words, when we look at art we’re not only looking at it we’re also looking into and through it, into and through the paint, pigment, canvas, or whatever to something else. You’re not only seeing yourself and the mind of the maker; in some metaphysical but organic way you’re seeing the group mind, and even all the minds that have ever lived. You’re seeing a static object that has thought and experience embedded in it, a changeless thing that changes through time. Of course, some art does just deal with so-called formal issues.

But even this art does more than that. In the days just after September 11, painter Gaylen Gerber reported the “small victories” he felt going to the Art Institute of Chicago and simply “looking at shiny plastic furniture from the ‘60s and 70s that,” as he put it, “in some way, maybe because of its superficial and ultra clean look, made me feel a little better.”

Gerber was experiencing the ways in which art tells you things you don’t know you need to know until you know them. He was in touch with how art can be “a vacation from the self,” in critic Peter Schjeldahl’s words, or a journey to it, how its a system for mapping, reflecting, prospecting, and creating consciousness. Art is a region where protocols are invented or suspended and things one doesn’t understand change one’s life. That’s why Gerber’s shiny chairs cut through the gloom, a ceramic pot can vie for greatness with the Sistine Ceiling, and the Vietnam Memorial channels a nation’s remorse even though it is based on the one thing that most Americans purport to loath: Abstraction.

Art is often political when it doesn’t seem political and not political when that’s all it seems to be. Neither Andy Warhol nor Donald Judd made overtly political art. Yet both changed the way the world looks and the way we look at the world. That’s because art creates new thought structures. Art does far more than only meet the eye. It is part of the biota of the world. It exists within a Holistic system.

Jerry Saltz, 2007 juror
New York City
January, 2007

 

April 2006
Anania, Katie. "Death and Praxis: Michelle Forsyth's Presentation of Incidents is Hardly Routine" City Life, Las Vegas, NV
[ pdf 267kb. ]

BY KATIE ANANIA
Michelle Forsyth spent part of her youth living on a 42-foot boat off the coast of Canada, which inspires all manner of imaginary swashbuckling narratives about her dealings with the pirate sea. However, her artist statement for Routine Incidents, Forsyth's solo exhibition on view at the Charleston Heights Arts Center Gallery, paints a decidedly un-pirate-like, claustrophobic picture of the ocean -- a picture that materializes all too quickly in her pictures of violent human tragedy and turgid marine life. Forsyth writes that in her early days, when the ocean was rocked by storms, there were no idyllic adventures on deck, but instead only terrifying moments that caused her to turn inward and contemplate the imminent destruction of herself and others. These themes have emerged at the heart of her latest works.

And initially, death becomes them. In "Green Slip," for instance, the gouache-on-watercolor-paper image apprehended is shocking, and yes, wholly disgusting -- it's a picture of a person lying prone against some surface (probably the floor), shot through the head. Blood pours over the person's shattered skull and dampens his face, and the agony of the scene is abundantly clear.

The image is fuzzy, though. Get close and you'll notice that the painted image is composed of minuscule cross-hatchings of color, deftly and individually shaded to give the illusion of blood, flesh and cloth. Like a cross-stitched version of Georges Seurat's pointillist landscapes, the colors are lickably delicious when viewed up close by themselves (Forsyth uses a lot of mauves, whites and violets against peachy colors to create flesh tones), and uncomfortably quasi-cohesive when viewed from afar. Holes are punctured in some of the paintings, undoing the distinction between the picture and its setting.

Throughout the show, whether it's used to make pictures of octopus tentacles or bathroom suicides, this technique is featured again and again ... and we know the effect. If you grew up in the days of selective cable television, it's how you viewed the adult video channels as a child. If you've seen the 2001 film Waking Life, it's the way in which director Richard Linklater engineered a visually splendid but narratively bankrupt version of the message: "What you see can be infinitely re-addressed by how it's presented." If you've looked at anything out of Andy Warhol's "Death and Disaster" series, you've witnessed the poverty of this principle at its very, very best.

The images in her disaster pictures, Forsyth says, are cribbed from Internet photos, which mercifully eliminate her need to see these things happen in real time or even see them played out on television. This kind of distance, the lack of context and the almost ritualistic purification of experience through the image, is the real meat and potatoes of Forsyth's practice. She takes theoretical cues from writers like Paul Virilio, who claims that accidents are engineered at the moment of social or technical progress; according to this logic, Henry Ford is not only the author of the automobile, but the author of the car crash. Fragments of Virilio's views on disaster and media are clearly articulated in the compositions of Forsyth's works; her re-structured "mosaics" of disasters allow the viewer to experience these most gut-wrenching moments of abjection through purely pictorial means -- truncated and filtered, certainly, but no less disturbing.

Also on view in this show are several of Forsyth's "clusters" -- spiky shapes produced by sealing 300-pound watercolor paper to the surface of anemone-like structures of wood and latex. The same cool shades of Forsyth's palette form geometric patterns on and around the clusters' surfaces. As if to offer a further statement on the phantasmagoric nature of representation, two five-minute video loops play on a screen just outside the gallery, and images of anemone and fish glide over a deceptively smooth surface, forming an interesting formal dialogue between the manipulations of dimension in the video and the depthlessness of the flat-screen television.

Despite its conceptual volleying, the ambitious content of some of Forsyth's more daring works seems to surge ahead of her practice. Her expansive, compelling use of color is mitigated by a lack of adherence to the formal properties that make similar artists' work so compelling. The fracturing of colors in "Octopi 2," for instance, has neither the technically-perfect chill of an Ingrid Calame painting (which might subject grotesque oil and paint stains to the principles of abstraction) nor the rough-hewn impact of a Chuck Close thumbprint portrait (which would use small, unassuming components to make up a deceptively realistic whole). Technical problems aside, however, Routine Incidents packs a stiff punch -- one that may require a few drinks and a long stay on dry land after it's over.

Katie Anania is an Assistant at the Las Vegas Art Museum.

 

May 2004
Hurowitz, Lila. " North of the Border: The Banff Centre"
Artist Trust Journal. Volume x1. No. 1, Spring 2004. p.5

... Michelle Frosyth, a painter, video artist, and 2003 Artist Trust Media Fellowship panelist, will be attending Banff this May though July for a three-month "Intranation" thematic residency. This residency will bring together a diverse group of artists who inhabit, discuss, critique, and articulate the nation-within-nation sensibility. Michelle has been collecting images of terror and will use these to explore how the Bush government has been using images to support a "war on terror." Michelle says the application process was pretty seamless and, although the rates look pricey, Banff is very generous with financial aid; you can receive up to 50% of the cost of your residency. A British Columbia printmaker who just returned told Michelle that she and her fellow artists in residence took field trips to Calgary to get art supplies, and all agreed that the big hot tub was frosting on a very nice cake. She also noted that Banff is especially looking for printmakers, since not many apply.

 

April 2004
Boggs, Sherri. "Inlander Picks: Pattern and Dissolution"
The Pacific Northwest Inlander, April 1, 2004, p. 4

The first time I saw a piece by Michelle Forsyth it was in a group show at the MAC's Art at Work gallery. To be honest I don't remember everything else that was in the show, but what I do remember is staring at a large painting for several minutes - taken in by the sunny colors and the pointillist mode of execution - before realizing that I was looking at a painting of a car wreck.

Forsyth - who lived on a sailboat off the Canadian coast as a child and currently teaches in the fine arts department at WSU - has two distinct bodies of work in this show at Lorinda Knight. In addition to her "trauma" paintings, she also explores the patterns underlying the undulating surfaces of bodies of water, both in paintings and in digital video. Her art is the kind you want to walk up to and then back away from - and then examine closely again. Up close, you see precise circles, beautiful spots of color and individual brush strokes. From six feet away, the edges blur, and it all coalesces into a larger picture. And yet you can't help but moving in for another, closer look.

 

July 2003
Boggs, Sheri. "Figures Reinvented"
The Pacific Northwest Inlander, July 17, 2003, p. 21-22

... The one artist perhaps not so familiar to local audiences is Canadian artist Michelle Forsyth (who is on the art faculty at WSU). Her "Trauma" series, triggered by Internet images of accidents and other traumatic occurrences, uses the typically feminine craft of cross stitch, as well as the pointillism of Impressionist art, to convey ghastly head wounds and nasty automobile accidents. It's compelling, startling work, and of all of the figures represented, her have the most to do with "disfiguration."

 

May 2003
Stocker, Gerfried. "Unplugged: Art as the Scene of Global Conflicts"
ARS Electronica 2002 Katalogue. (translation from German)

...A critical overview and enlightened view of the flow of information on the internet and thus heightened interest in pornography, catastrophes and 'horrible acts' is found in Yellow Accident, the pointillist painting by Michelle Forsyth, who takes these Internet images "which fetishize the mortality of the human body" (and the perversions linked to this) and transfers them into the context of the medium of painting."...

 

April 2003
Harvey, Katharine. "Push Play: Marie de Sousa, Michelle Forsyth, Mara Korkola, Melinda Morey" brochure essay for Push Play Mercer Union, Toronto, ON, Canada

Although the relationship between painting and photography has been examined exhaustively, the connection between painting and video is relatively uncharted terrain. In Push Play , the artists Marie de Sousa, Michelle Forsyth, Mara Korkola and Melinda Morey explore how the time-based motion of video and the stillness of the painted surface inform and inspire each other. Each artist in this exhibition examines the constant state of flux that exists in familiar environments of their past or present by creating a dialogue between painting and video that defines the material parameters of both media while connecting their aesthetic concerns.

Record
Harkening back to her childhood spent living on a sailboat, Michelle Forsyth explores the undulating topography of water in hypnotic video shots of oceans and aquariums. Using her computer to build intricate geometric patterns, she creates positive and negative spaces that frame the video clips of water. The saturation and opacity of the images of water continually change as they are filtered through these decorative screens. In her paintings, Forsyth replicates these digital pixels with free flowing pigment, thereby creating tension between the liquidness of the paint and the rigidity of the graphic gridlines.

Mara Korkola's night photography of the familiar roads she travels is the inspiration for her enigmatic paintings. She captures dynamic images of highways and gasoline alleys, pointing and shooting the camera out of car windows. Her videos mark the natural extension of her fascination with the motion of cars as they dissolve into the haze of street lamps and shimmering asphalt. In her paintings, she then further abstracts the play of headlights flickering in the dimness with loose brushstrokes that skip across the surfaces of small wood panels.

For one year, at three-week intervals, Marie de Sousa photographed a specific location in her neighbourhood park, and used the succession of photographs as source material for a single painting that evolved and changed like the seasons. She documented her painting process by taking one still shot for every fifteen minutes of time spent painting. De Sousa's work accounts for the passage of time as she collects video stills while the paint layers accumulate.

Melinda Morey videotapes fellow surfers riding ocean waves, and through a meticulous editing process, she erases, frame by frame, the surrounding water and sky so that the figures are left to ride an infinite white void. While she was acquiring and editing the video images, Morey began a series of wall paintings that extend this metaphor of transience. The artist strategically paints the bodies in lofty locations or in the corner of a room so that the steep angles of perspective make them appear to be in motion, either falling or losing balance.

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Morey deliberately paints her figures directly on the walls of the gallery knowing that they will be whitewashed when the exhibition is over. Portions of the monochromatic bodies appear to dissolve into the whiteness of the room. The temporary nature of her paintings is a meditation on the impermenance of life and by projecting the video of surfers onto a blank wall without framing them in any way echoes this ethereality. Energized by the motion it contains, the void surrounding the surfers seems to buzz and quake, and in the same way her wall paintings activate the architecture of the gallery. In both media, white space is the solvent that erodes and eventually erases the figures.

The disintegrating agent in Korkola's work is the shadow of night. As her video camera struggles to discern the highways in the dark, she allows it to randomly shift the images in and out of focus. The blackness appears thick and sluggish; luminescent beams of light are barely able to permeate it. Likewise, the glossy black surfaces of her paintings engulf the shining headlamps and road signs causing them to become indiscernible blurs of light.

De Sousa also obscures her subject matter, not by directly removing information through erasure or twilight, but rather by painting new imagery over top. Referring to the series of source photographs, she applies colours and glazes in an unsystematic manner that constantly revises the landscape. Her ephemeral video projection is a sequential record of her painting process as she gradually covers the scene over with new layers of paint. De Sousa's video does not strictly fit into the category of time-lapse photography; as it erases and accelerates, the passage of time carries the documentation beyond the boundaries of this genre.

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Through video technology, de Sousa reduces her year-long project to a series of stills, paradoxically making the entire process seem immediate. The twenty-minute tape documents and condenses approximately 260 hours of the painter's labour in front of the canvas. It does not record the additional time involved in making the video, such as the little dance number she performs in between each still, or turning off extra lights, releasing drapes, rolling the paint cart away, then backtracking to get ready for the next painting session.

Like de Sousa, Morey de-emphasizes her laborious video editing in the interest of portraying a seamless event--in her case, the fluid choreography of surfers floating in a void. It took Morey over 200 hours to erase the surging ocean from every frame of her short video. This slow, reductive technique contrasts sharply with the direct, almost calligraphic nature of her wall paintings.

Forsyth, on the other hand, spent far less time designing digital masks on her computer than she did constructing her complex paintings. She developed a lengthy procedure for transforming the electronic images of water into thick brushstrokes that form large knitted patterns. Fragments of colour nudge those next to them, which nudge the next ones, interacting with one another over several months of the painting process.

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Forsyth describes her paintings as physical objects having a strong material presence and displays them as unframed rectangles. The flat LCD screens hanging on the wall reference the thickness of her paintings on birch panels. Korkola also shows her roadway videos on monitors of minimal design whose screen sizes match the dimensions of her compact oil paintings. The electronic hardware that these artists use sets up a dialogue with the wooden supports on which the paintings are "played."

Korkola and Forsyth's bold applications of paint build up rich pigments into tactile surfaces meant to interact with the body of the viewer. These artists both feel that the same subject matter appears more distant on video because of the glassy smoothness of the screen. The ultra-sheer plane conceals editorial marks as images are translated into pure iridescent light. When shifting her work to video, Korkola finds the potency of her subject lies in its hypnotic visual rhythms--the staccato beat of headlights moving behind trees--which mesmerize the spectator. Similarly, by compositing video clips, Forsyth finds a vehicle for exploring the fluctuating surface of water.

In Push Play the luminance of video is an ethereal realm animated by electricity, offering painting another surface in which to refer. The tactile and static realm of painting inspires the immaterial world of video, and magnetically binds them together. In turn, the action of video invisibly energizes the substance of paint by inspiring these artists to work with the added dimension of motion.

 

April 2002
McGlynn, Tom. "Surface Considerations"
Deluxe catalogue essay, Jersey City, NJ

The word deluxe in common usage most often refers to the ultimate win in the consumer product shell game of marginal differentiation ranging from "as is" all the way up to super - deluxe. The word in this context has a distinctly middlebrow ring to it, as in cheeseburger - deluxe or deluxe condominiums. Both the food and the lodging do offer more bells and whistles than their regular versions but ultimately serve the same function. The meaning of deluxe in these instances is the promise of instant bourgeois similitude; living large and having it all.

One of the most famous art invocations of deluxe came with Matisse's Fauve transitional painting entitled Luxe, calm et volupte, which John Elderfield describes as "a form of construction that shows separation and estrangement, and nostalgia for coherence impossible to maintain"1. Matisse drew for his subject upon the picturesque conventions of depicting arcadia as a world of lost beauty and sensuality. He used the pretense as a windowpane upon which he could declaratively enact the physical lushness of the painting's surface. In this painting which Elderfield describes as "a tangible wall composed of neo- impressionist bricks"2 the image's "tactility counters vision and its wish to see through, by maintaining surface itself as the locus for all meaning"3. While this construct relies upon a willing spectator to project a sense of longing and poetic reverie into its scene, the painting amplifies that longing by disbursing the viewer's wishes across the surface of its beauty.  In this sense the nostalgic logic behind the Arcadian picturesque and its allegory of fleeting sensuality becomes frozen in the present in the form of a beautiful mask.

In "The Truth Of Masks", his essay on the essential content of costume in Shakespearean drama, Oscar Wilde writes, "the truth of metaphysics are the truth of masks"4. He describes the surface of the spectacle as a network of meanings making up the substance of the drama. Wilde defined a central position for theatrical affectation. Rather than considering the surface elements as conditionally symbolic of the dramatic essence of the plays, a customarily platonic view of mimetic outsides being representative of any deeper meaning, he declares that the various guises embody the core of the meaning of the plays. The surface contains the substance.

It is interesting to re-consider a more recent reference , not to theater but to artistic theatricality, in Michael Fried's 1967 essay "Art and Objecthood". He writes, "Art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theater. Theater is the common denominator that links a large and seemingly disparate variety of activities to one another"5.  Fried criticized Minimal Art for what he saw as its diffusion of  "specific objects " into a field, or surface that engaged the viewer's sensational experience. Theater and the art object were mutually exclusive terms for Fried. The "art thing" had to maintain a qualitative distance to all other "things" in order for it to maintain its value. Maintaining standards of quality in this way refers back to the common categorization of the "deluxe "in privileged relation to the "as is."  Fried's deluxe art experience relied upon denial of the claim to ultimate beauty or sensuality of the entire body of experience. Minimalism's "as is", (Frank Stella's "What you see is what you see") took seriously the phenomenological reality of temporal duration as being and thing.  This latter approach towards art making is relevant here and it becomes crucial how this ethic has trickled down and has been inflected with more recent perceptions of beauty and the surface of things.

As our daily experience takes on more the appearance of the spectacular in a pictorial sense via what Baudrillard calls the "miracle of total availability, of the transparency of all functions of space"6 our relation to "thingness "of things (including art things) changes. This picture of total availability is wrought by the technological production and distribution of images in television, advertising and the Internet, which don't necessarily rely upon any truth value to substantiate their claim to reality. The speed with which these pictures of a "skinned"7 reality can navigate a relational network of associative meaning (akin to ensemble theater) is directly proportionate to their unreality. Speed of information transfer has a high premium in our deluxe world. The platonic relation between image and substance becomes severed and in its place is a slick surface of total availability, which is at once interior and all exterior. It is a situation in which the Minimalist conflation of being and thing in "specific objects" can seem romantically nostalgic for a lost truth. The obdurate thingness of the world becomes our inaccessible Arcadian reverie. We are separated from it by the surface of cultural similitude upon which we project our gorgeous dramas.

For artists who make things, or if not, make statements that wish to be read as culturally resilient, this condition presents certain dilemmas and opportunities. Originality is paradoxically suspect as being insincere in a "natural" environment of appropriation, re-combination, and systematic projection made possible by new methodologies of image consumption.8 The problem of artistic influence however becomes almost a non-issue as associative meaning can be incanted with the specific choices an artist makes from pre-existing artistic ensembles. There can evolve an acceptance of this situation, which allows artists to navigate the shallows as freely as the insubstantial images with which they play.  At this point most art is still circumscribed by its physical limits; its reality as thing, and therefore must address its appearance to the condition of the viewer's attention. This brings us around to the question of surface effect of things as the spectator's theater.

The new construction of surface can use an attendant ideology to help explain the sociological import of the shift from platonic mimetics, i.e. the thing representing the surface of the idea, to the surface being the idea. In Mille Plateaux, Deleuze and Guattari propose a conception of thought as rhizomatic9; a continually branching network supporting central and tangential areas simultaneously so as not to privilege one over the other and therefore preclude a hierarchical or linear reading. This amounts to a field theory based on an organic machine. The collective conscious of the Internet fulfills this promise, as does the total availability of at least the surface of our consumer culture. It is more relevant these days to scan the surface than to delve for a deeper meaning.

The surface as subject is a perceptual "plateau" which the artists in Deluxe explore in ways uniquely their own. The show is not really organized around an idea but more an effect.

Johnathan Butt presents anecdotal scenario in the form of domestic sites of contemplation. The hearth and the fountain are places of reverie and reflection. In his work they become transformed by a charmingly intrusive geometric pixilation of those forms, which would typically evoke contemplation, the changeable flame and the infinite water ripple. His transformations resist a deeper reading.

Michelle Forsyth, the show's organizer, pays attention to both the conceptual skin of computer-manipulated imagery, in her syntactically layered videos, and the literal surface of her ornamental waterscapes. She is an artist intimately involved with the hand made in her delicately wrought paintings while maintaining an awareness and willingness to engage in technological alternates for developing shimmering surfaces.

Jennifer Forsyth paints cropped illusions of drapery studies from unidentifiable "old master" paintings. They represent the costuming of painting's academic influence re-made beautiful when torn from an historical insistence.

Johnathan Garfinkel works a subversive theatricality into his generously hued paintings. Central voids of histrionic color are framed by prosceniums of playfully invasive organic forms. He seems to conflate artifice and nature as a combined dramatic epiphany.

Katharine Harvey's subject focuses on narrowly circumscribed worlds in the reflective surfaces of store windows. Aside from the obvious allusion to window shopping (consumer surfing) her paintings amplify the dissolution of both store and streetscape in a beautiful simultaneity of abstract form.

Liss Platt literalizes the artist's involvement with surface facture with a series of photographs of her own skin bruised by playing in amateur hockey leagues. Hockey has been historically associated with a male mask or "game face" that does not allow for subtle reading. Platt's close ups of purple, red, and orange bruises mimic on one level formless abstractions while remaining empathetic to the effect of violence to the surface of the sensate body.

Michelle Provenzano, like Katherine Harvey, severely differentiates her subject matter from any "natural" reality. Her hypothetical locations in karaoke bars with their lurid color, manic patterning and pastiche perspective parody the false re-enactment of romantic persona that characterize such places.

Pete Riesett's photographic documentation of domestic tableaux of refrigerator magnets collected form tourist locations and other low art collecting pursuits present cultural cliché as cumulative pathos.

Todd Rosenbaum plays with the artificially manufactured picturesque in his constructed natural landscapes. The natural as fascinating facade is the idea that seems to power his productions.

Henry Sanchez's forms grow from sparkling assemblages of colorful reflective vinyl Mylar. The sculptures function as transparent symbols, the surface of dreams. Their permeable sense of reality evokes a kinship with Latin American magic realist novelists.

Surface Considerations, copyright Tom McGlynn 2002
tomxmcglynn @ yahoo.com

 

September 2000
Gustafson, Paula. "Michelle Forsyth at Third Avenue Gallery"
Asian Art News. September/ October 2000, p. 103-104

Portraiture isn't what it used to be - well certainly not the kind of portraiture popular in 17th and 18th century Europe. The royal personages flatteringly portrayed by painters such as Velasquez and Van Dyck represent a kind of magnificence we will never see again. As archly decorous as court etiquette, these guilt-framed conceits purposefully confirmed the power of monarchy and inherited title.

The exaggerated grandeur exuded by this style of portraiture provides the source material for Michelle Forsyth's 'Upper Crust' paintings. In the series, two of the 84 x 60 inch canvasses take their imagery from historical portraits of George III and Louis XIII. Two other large paintings of kingly figures and five smaller ones depicting jeweled crowns round out an exhibition which, according To the New York-based artist, "comments on the artifice of power, masculinity, and the authority of large-scale painting."

Forsyth's approach to painting is as systematically meditated as diplomatic protocol. After accessing the portraits electronically from royal art collection catalogs and other museum archives, she manipulates the images and adds new backgrounds. The reworked computer printouts are then projected onto the canvas and the picture is painted in pixel-like brush strokes. Her methodology is a personal trait - a childhood spent living in the limited confines of a sailboat on Canada's West Coast left Forsyth with the ineluctable habit of organizing everything in her life - but the results do not reflect her obsessive habits. Rather, the paint handling is loose and expressive.

It is tough to nail down whether Forsyth's paintings fall into the category of portraits or if their focus is the patterning on the elaborate costuming that designates nobility. In 'Blue Venus', for instance, Louis XIII's extravagant blue velvet robe fills more than half of the canvas, its fanciful embroidery competing for viewer attention with the all-over fleur-de-lis-painted backdrop. The king's uncrowned visage (and his shapely, silk stocking-clad legs) seem insignificant compared to the jouissance of the surface decoration.

Vir Heroicus Sublimis I (2000) is painted with more restraint and more delight in excessive ornamentation. Here, Forsyth repeats the back tail tips of the royal cloak's ermine-fur lining as dark dashes punctuate a background tinted in pale ochre shadings of the figure's gold-hued scepter and sword. The wallpaper-like background ambiguously slides into the foreground at the base of the painting, disturbing the perspective by bringing both figure and ground to the fore. Complicating the shallow viewing field, a pixilated negative space suggests a curly periwig framing the king's sneering face. Searching for a fix on the picture plane, the viewer's gaze seizes on the figure's pink-ribboned, high-heeled satin shoes - outré props supporting superficial command.