Additional Artists A-F & Exhibitions'11: Michelle Forsyth

Consisting of watercolor, gouache, screenprint and cut-paper, my work focuses on subjects often associated with tragedy and loss. With sources that range from eyewitness accounts and photographs of large-scale disasters to smaller-scale depictions of human suffering and accidents downloaded from the Internet, I work to explore my own experience in relation to tragic public events.

Most recently I have 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, wildflowers growing up though the cracks in the sidewalk, or textual accounts from eyewitnesses. Using a compassionate process that is part requiem and part cathartic obsession, I translate these presences into thousands of sinuous loops of undulating color, intricately stacked and cut paper flowers, and diluted layers of watercolor to inscribe these images with traces of my own gestures, simultaneously testing the imprint of my own presence while evoking ideas about memory, loss and grief.

Forsyth holds an MFA from Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ) and a BFA from the University of Victoria (Victoria, BC). She has exhibited widely at venues including: The Hunterdon Museum of Art (Clinton, NJ); The Charleston Heights Arts Center (Las Vegas, NV); Deluge Contemporary Art (Victoria, BC); Mercer Union (Toronto, ON); The Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture (Spokane, WA); and The Kirkland Art Center (Seattle, WA). She has been the recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and Artist Trust, and was recently awarded second prize in the William and Dorothy Yeck young painters competition (Oxford, OH). Forsyth’s work is featured in books including: The Anthology of Art: in Theory and Dialogue, edited by Jochen Gerz, and Carte Blanche, Vol. 2 - Painting.