McHenry County College is thrilled to host a Visiting Artist Talk + Artist Reception for Christine Forni’s solo exhibition, Natural Recall.

August 5 – September 13, 2024
McHenry County College | Galleries One & Two
8900 U.S. Highway 14, Crystal Lake, IL 60012

Artist Talk & Reception: Wednesday, September 11
2:30 p.m. — Artist Talk in the Luecht Auditorium, B170 | In-person and presented virtually on Zoom: https://mchenrycc.zoom.us/j/99782565489
3:30 p.m. — Reception in Gallery One, A212x

Free and open to the public

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ARTIST STATEMENT

The exhibition Natural Recall addresses the shifting landscapes of nature and memory through methodically deconstructing and then reinterpreting relationships merging from the past to the present. The installations I create are an archive of discarded elements from other more meticulously crafted bodies of work. I capture moments of solitude with terrain using light in interaction with glass, porcelain, reclaimed minerals, and paint skins. The work merges unused remnants or overlooked relics to evoke, recall, and remember. Salvaged and mounted together like specimens, they form a “beautiful but broken” material memory of a point in time. Unlike precious specimens, these are not preserved under glass but placed vulnerably on the surface with their fragility on display. The glass layers in my sculptural paintings invite close observation and reveal unexpected margins as well as the tenacity of nature through time. Layering these elements in a complex deconstruction/reconstruction process and employing chromatic translucent shifts straying from a source’s original color allows the landscape to become mentally stratified. In this work, I use imagery collected from my environmental community drawing project, Drawing You Outside. My experience growing up in the Rust Belt—where industry and nature are often starkly juxtaposed—informs my studio practice.

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BIO

Currently based in Chicago, Christine Forni is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting and sculpture, alternative photography, drawing, and installation. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as Ueno Royal Japanese Art Museum and Awagami Paper Museum, Japan; Museo Internazionale Italia Arte and Museo di Scienze Naturali, Italy; Busan Federation of Art & Culture, South Korea; Centro de Artesanía Catalunya, Spain; Academia Romana, Romania; Museo Franz Mayer and Centro Cultural de Baja California, Mexico; Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Rockford Art Museum and Hyde Park Art Center, Illinois; Houston Museum of Contemporary Craft, Texas; and DeCordova Sculpture Museum, Massachusetts. For more information about the Forni, visit www.christineforni.com and her Instagram page @christineforni.

IMAGE CREDIT: Christine Forni, Looking for Refractions in the Light (detail), 2024, Oil and acrylic on canvas, paint skins, glass, stainless steel wire and aluminum

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