Catherine Forster: They Call Me Theirs

Catherine Forster: They Call Me Theirs
Hyde Park Art Center
opening reception August 3rd, 3-5PM

They Call Me Theirs is a multi-media installation
composed of sculpture, video, prints, and sound, creating an encounter
intended to question the distinctions we make between the natural and
digital world. They Call Me Theirs reverses the
experience of the outdoors by neatly packaging the four seasons in a
“Box Set” placed inside a cabin, suggesting that our efforts to purify
our experience with nature have actually taken us farther away from it.

The title of the work is taken from a line in the poem “Hamatreya” by
Ralph Waldo Emerson, which questions man’s desire to claim ownership of
the land that is inherently owned by nature. In the poem, the Earth
responds, “How am I theirs, / If they cannot hold me, / But I hold
them?”

Two different cacophonous sound tracks play from both the interior and
exterior of the cabin, highlighting the tension between the two
environments. Adjacent to the gallery housing the cabin is a “
hanging
garden” composed of large-scale ink jet prints on aluminum sign panels.
The prints were sourced from video stills,
then painted, and digitized,
creating a luscious though synthetic environment.

Hyde Park Art Center
5020 S. Cornell Avenue
Chicago, IL 60615
773-324-5520

http://www.liveboxgallery.com
http://www.catforster.com