Thursday, July 19, 2007

Michael Forrest’s Artistic Statement:

Upon reading Haiku #10, I was struck immediately and viscerally by the power-fully brutal imagery. Mothers killing their newborns is so antithetical to maternal instinct that I could not escape visions of the horrendous realities of confinement aboard slave ships like Angel. My contribution is an attempt to reify thoughts of those horrors, and the task requires visual imagery that conveys faithfully the force of the poetic imagery.

Creating this piece was traumatic for me, and I feared that my personal vision might result in a creation that seemed excessively or gratuitously lurid. It is my sincere hope that this piece synergizes with the powerful poetic imagery, and with the work of other collaborators, to serve as a solemn memorial to the madres and their niños — and all the other victims of vessels like Angel.

I hope also that my contribution imprints an indelible cautionary mark that will remind viewers that societal institutions dehumanize persons as they marginal-ize, neglect, and abuse people groups by regarding them as commodities or even by reducing them into memberships of discrete constituent “populations” in the service of political expediency. Institutions have no soul, no conscience, and cannot accept blame or responsibility. All individuals, however, are responsible to respect and promote the humanity of all other humans. I submit my work, there-fore, as a memorial and a challenge for each person to heed the ancient, wise admonition to “Treat others the same way you want them to treat you.”

My work is photographic. I implement digital capture, processing, and printing technologies to construct digital mixed media creations on fine art papers. The visual imagery in my creation is not intended to be particularly cryptic or ambigu-ous; the angelic icon has a dual role, representing good and evil forces. The chain represents bondage — bonds of maternal love and the condition of human bondage. To liberate their infants, mothers like “Eve” delivered them from the Angel… to the angels.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Very moving Michael...very much looking forward to seeing all the work at this exhibit being absorbed...hopefully enough to make changes outside of the exhibit...