Murder of Eight Student Nurses, Chicago, IL, July 15, 1966 (Drawing #14 from the 100 Drawings Project) gouache on watercolor paper, 28 x 42 inches, 2007
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 suggests a threat of terrorism. For this reason, photographing each of these sites 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 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 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 will document the absence it, picturing the sites as they are today.
Using images of disaster and accident in my work, I have often addressed the human costs involved in living within 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 push 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.”
Michelle Forsyth
Seattle, WA
Washington
North America
