The School of Art Gallery is pleased to present my brain like strips of confetti, a solo exhibition by Maya de Forest that reconfigures the extensive personal and professional archive of her father, Claude Pierre de Forest, a former professor in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Manitoba. After four years caring for Claude through the later stages of Alzheimer’s disease, Maya began to consider the creative potential of what he left behind.

The archive includes slides, notebooks, photographs, videotapes and other analogue materials, some used for teaching. It reflects Claude’s engagement with the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, including environmental and social movements, metaphysics, ancient civilizations, ufology and the cosmic consciousness movement. Together, these materials form a vast collection from a pre-Internet era, when knowledge was assembled, stored and shared in very different ways.

Through video, collage, sculpture and installation, Maya cuts, layers and recombines these materials, drawing on her father’s associative methods and sense of humour. At times, it becomes difficult to determine where Claude’s gesture ends and Maya’s begins.

Neither biography nor an attempt to recover her father, my brain like strips of confetti explores collecting as both a form of knowledge production and a material practice. Rather than resolving the archive into a coherent narrative, Maya engages with its fragmented, contradictory and often absurd nature.

This work was created with the support of the Winnipeg Arts Council, the Manitoba Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Opening reception:
October 29, 5:00-8:00 pm
Main Gallery

Artist Talk:
November 5, 12:00 pm
Room 368, ARTlab