what we are up to…

We’re excited to have you join us Friday, March 12th from 6-8pm for this month’s gallery stroll in Belltown with wine and hand massages!

We are featuring the work of Michael Edward McGovern and his wife Roxanne McGovern.

Artist Statements

The environments and people that have surrounded my life inform the art I create. My work is about constructing autobiographical images that explore the ghosts and spirits of my past.  I am interested in how both personal and cultural histories have profoundly affected my visual language.

I compose memorials to the intangible memories of my past.  By visually recording impressions of specific times, places, and events in my life I am preserving memories that seem to fade with each passing year.

My work calls upon the repetitive nature of printmaking and photography to create a network of reoccurring images that I can meditate on to help search for a truth.  I use a lexicon of images that relate to specific events in my history.  Repeated images of bridges, birds, trains, war, masks, urban landscapes, and old family portraits find their way into my work lending themselves to an unfolding narrative.  All these images carry a personal biography, but also carry the weight of their own metaphors helping to furnish an ever-growing personal narrative.

Michael Edward McGovern 2010

Two years ago I read a book titled Black Dog of Fate by Peter Balakian.  It is a coming of age memoir about growing up as a fourth generation Armenian in America.   Balakian did not really know anything about his family history until he became an adult and began to do his own research. Through his research he discovered his families involvement in the Armenian genocide and how and why they immigrated to America.  His family never spoke of their past, and Balakian had to piece his own history together.

For years I have been making work about issues surrounding my family, but it was this book that inspired me to go in the direction I am now.  I cannot imagine growing up in a family that never shared their history with the younger generations.  I grew up in an Armenian family who talked incessantly about our past and our legacy.  I have dug deeper into that history and focused on my Babi Jan (grandfather).  My recent work is about him and how his survival of war and genocide has helped shape our family, and more specifically, who I have become.

Roxanne McGovern 2010