Point Ellice Bridge Collapse, Victoria, BC, May 26, 1896. gouache and glitter on watercolor paper, 28 x 42 inches, 2007

The Hogar Collection is very pleased to announce the opening of the fall season with a much anticipated exhibition by Michelle Forsyth. In her first New York solo show, Paperwork, she will present a culmination of her incessant investigations of color, form, texture and concept. Widening the range and scope, she is pushing the medium of paper and seeing it realized into painting, sculpture, assemblage/collage and installation. Using a repetitive process where layers upon layers of marks and patterns are arranged within grid frameworks, the work contains a demanding sense of pictorial control that is reminiscent of fractal-like clusters. They simultaneously are abstract and representational and take their subject matter from everyday tragic moments in life ranging from mining accidents, train wrecks, hotel fires and war. Using imagery from newspapers, the internet or her own personal documentation, she transforms these horrific incidents into beautiful memorializations. Over all, the work sympathetically embraces and celebrates the human condition in a way that tries to come to terms with an intellectual understanding of our unknowing in this existence.

Michelle Forsyth was born in Vancouver British Columbia in 1972, received an MFA from Rutgers University and a BFA from the University of Victoria, BC. Her work has been widely exhibited across Canada and the United States at venues including Shift Gallery (Seattle, WA); Lorinda Knight Gallery (Spokane, WA); Third Avenue Gallery (Vancouver, BC); The Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture (Spokane, WA); The Charleston Heights Arts Center (Las Vegas, NV); Mercer Union (Toronto, ON); Truck Contemporary Art (Calgary, AB); the Kirkland Art Center (Seattle, WA). She recently received second prize in the William and Dorothy Yeck award for young painters competition at Miami University in Oxford, OH. She lives and works in Pullman, Washington and teaches painting and drawing at Washington State University.

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