Michele Goulette: DOWNRIVER

Michele Goulette’s decades-long practice has shifted from its origins in physical and material methods like printmaking and photography. Since 2009, she has worked primarily in digital video.  While the forms her work has taken have changed, the lens through which she examines the world has remained fixed inward. She collects images, ambient sound, incidental recordings, and later through editing in the studio, the works emerge.

“Everything drifts. Everything is slowly swirling, philosophies tangled with the grocery lists, unreal-real anxieties like rose thorns waiting to tear the uncertain flesh, nonentities of thoughts floating like plankton…”

― Margaret Laurence, The Fire-Dwellers

DOWNRIVER brings together some of her earlier works in AWE’s collection with video works made between 2008 – 2021. Shown together, the similarities in process and method that Goulette has drawn through her career as an artist are highlighted.  As her work has moved from physical to immaterial collage, it has retained the same sensibility. It is a transference more than a transformation. Ranging from explorations and meditations on the natural world to hinting at deeply personal narratives.  Images and subjects carry through from work to work. They are unified by Goulette’s methods of laying everything out and paying attention to where patterns can be articulated. Her reflective works propose that individual experiences translate to universal themes. Through sharing her carefully assembled perspective, Goulette invites you to consider your own.

Learn more about the artist and her work on her new website.

Guest-curated by Nadja Pelkey