World Trade Center Memorial Irish Artist Michelle Rogers commemorates 9/11 at the Irish Arts Center in New York City in 2003
“You can't be more horrific than life itself,” said Francis Bacon, the
Irish born artist whose tormented, grisly paintings reflect a sense of
internal helplessness in the face of an unfathomable, frequently ugly
world. Despair, he believed, is our birthright as human beings.
And
despair was all we could do, as the events of September 11th unfolded.
Even after delivering world wars, the holocaust, ethnic cleansing, the
troubles, schoolyard massacres, Oklahoma … life had once again proved
its ability to wantonly shock and horrify.
Award winning Irish
painter, Michelle Rogers, has spent the past year trying to capture
that collective despair in her tribute painting ‘World Trade Center
Memorial’ which is to be exhibited at The Irish Arts Center in New York
City through February and March.
Few artists are as qualified to
tackle such an overwhelming subject. For the past 15 years, Ms. Rogers
has challenged political, social and economic injustices through her
paintings which reflect the dark, discordant elements of human nature.
She has constantly pushed the envelope on our limitations, whether it
is responding to the horrific brutality of the Bosnian war or sexuality
in a religiously repressed Ireland. Her paintings are not
pastel-pretty, nor are they relaxing to look at, yet they are
compelling, possess a majestic, silent beauty. “My art is about
conflict,” she says “Large scale conflict, internal conflict and the
spaces in between.”
Born in Dundalk, which borders the troubled
North of Ireland, she was exposed to conflict from a very early age.
“My family used to go up north every Sunday, passing army checkpoints,
armored vehicles and soldiers with machine guns,” she remembers, “I saw
the dramatic way in which identity becomes an issue - for which people
are ready to kill and die.”
Some years later, after seeing several of her pictures based on the Gulf War, Amnesty International invited Ms. Rogers to participate in an artist’s exhibition along the borders of Yugoslavia. It was the height of the war in Bosnia, and she heard many accounts of mass evacuations, funerals, bombings, all of which filled her with anger and frustration. “It was difficult for me to accept that Europe was allowing another genocide to take place,” she says, wryly. “Initially, I did some small paintings for Amnesty but could not shake my rage about it, so I continued working”. The result was “A Dark Heart”, a disturbingly forthright collection of four large paintings, which exhibited in New York last year. Nicholas Bergman, curator of the Caelum Gallery and host to the exhibition, observed that Michelle “sensitively creates a mood of moral decay, of spiritual darkness and despair – but there is simultaneously grandeur to it which harks back to the masters – Goya in particular”.
Dedicated to the thousands of Irish and Irish Americans who will forever be caught up in the history of September 11th and to the many victims of that hellish day, Ms. Rogers’ latest painting exemplifies spiritual darkness and despair.
‘World Trade Center Memorial’ is a large, haunting image of the wreckage of the twin towers. The lower portion of the main canvas depicts rows of tiny figures, rescue workers, dwarfed by the rubble of the collapsed buildings. The surface texture of the paint is thick, clotted and heavy, the colors pale and tawny. In contrast, the upper panels are smoother, almost luminescent, yet shadowed in dark blues and blacks. The effect is almost like a comic book, emphasizing the sheer, unreal scale of the disaster. Small, individual portraits, representing the many people lost or affected by the tragedy, surround the large canvas.
With its many separate parts, its division of colors and textures, the overall painting is beautiful but unsettling: deeply fractured, both in physical form as well as subject matter – fractured canvas, fractured buildings, fractured lives, fractured dreams.
While working on the painting, Ms. Rogers spent time meeting with New Yorkers and talking through their experiences. "I drew inspiration from their stories” she says “and used those stories to bring new images to the work and to help it evolve”.
Michelle, who lives in Rome, was in New York on September 11th. “My brother was supposed to have been at the Twin Towers that morning,” she recalls. “For a couple of hours after the attacks I heard nothing from him and believed he was dead. The sensation I recall clearest was a desperate need to find him, to be able to sink my fingers into his skin….”. Her brother survived, but her anxieties remained. “I started painting ‘Memorial’ to try and understand those feelings, to try and represent what people went through that day”
The miniature portraits were inspired by the posters of the missing that fluttered on every available surface of New York in the weeks following the attacks. They are also reminiscent of the heartbreaking Portraits of Grief published by the New York Times throughout 2002, little snapshot images which so eloquently humanized the enormous scale of the destruction. “We all felt so unimportant afterwards, and it was the images of the missing people that kept us feeling human - I wanted to try to bring that perspective to the painting".
The past year has been cathartic certainly, and she is relieved, now, to have finished. “I think it’s at this point, after the clean up of ground zero, and after all the anniversary commemorations have finished, that the recovery process can really begin”.
Ms. Rogers has been invited to bring ‘World Trade Center Memorial’ to Dublin’s new Lead White Gallery, in September 2003.
World Trade Center Memorial, The Irish Arts Center, 553 West 51st Street, New York, NY 10010 February 7th – March 30th. Opening Reception. 6 p.m. – 8 p.m. Thursday February 6th 2003.
