| It was one hot afternoon in 2004 when I was riding up Tenth Avenue on my bicycle in Chelsea when I first saw Chantel Foretich’s work through a window of a restaurant. Peering into the window, little did I know then that such an incidental gesture on my part was the presence behind her work; an intimate bond between the viewer and object, because as I was to notice later, in Foretich’s work everything is validated—found objects to a relative’s gift of a magnolia flower. |  |
Toward a Motionless Childhood: Chantel Foretich and the Music of Dioramas – Cecilia Muhlstein
It was one hot afternoon in 2004 when I was riding up Tenth Avenue on my bicycle in Chelsea when I first saw Chantel Foretich’s work through a window of a restaurant. Peering into the window, little did I know then that such an incidental gesture on my part was the presence behind her work; an intimate bond between the viewer and object, because as I was to notice later, in Foretich’s work everything is validated–found objects to a relative’s gift of a magnolia flower. In her vast range of work, from dioramas to music boxes, illusive memories of the past are iconographed into what she calls “architectural macquettes for places that would never warrant such.”
Foretich’s work seeks “continuity” with the past; it is why all of her pieces are intensely personal since they are locations she has experienced herself. Subjects are various and range from bars, department stores and thrift stores. Bachelard wrote of the poetic qualities of houses in his Poetics of Space, the same could easily describe Foretich’s work as well: “We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images.” The intensity that Bachelard writes of houses is also the poetry of Foretich’s “spaces.”
The evidence, in this particular piece, Paperplate Throw, resided in the restaurant, La Lunchonette’s window. Behind the glass window a large flat panel depicted a parking lot, which encased below it a diminutive installation on two small boxes. On one box was a re-created T G & Y variety store, a long, but not forgotten, store. On top of the store a shower of tiny paper plates rotated with various items inscribed on them while the second box displayed a rocking horse kiddie ride almost the same size in height as the store.
The concept behind Paperplate Throw was a tradition that Foretich, a native of Mississippi, and her family participated in on Thanksgivings in a short period during the 1970s in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. The store would throw paper plates off the roof in a tradition of economic and national “goodwill.” What plate you caught indicated the prize you would receive.
The reproduction of this event is produced in a scale of merely a few inches, which is typical of Foretich’s work. Almost all of her work is in inches, which can range from 3 to 12 inches. Boxes, dioramas, music boxes, and any combination of the aforementioned are the mediums she works within. It is a process that Foretich wants to forge with her audience—a relationship. The breaking down of large scaled constructions into her smaller constructions reflects this idea. As she says, “I want the viewer to be able to see what I see and it’s possible in such a small scale.”
New York is also explored in a scaled down topography. In both the piece, My Old Lady and the very recent Walkway 24th and Seventh Avenue, a work constructed for the Exit Art exhibit, Traffic, Foretich literally recreates New York City’s chaotic urban space by slowing down the scenes we take for granted like a closed store or a construction site. My Old Lady refers to a corner on Seventh Avenue in Chelsea, in which a storefront, long closed, is now revitalized in Foretich’s piece. The colorful curtain from the second store upward, lit up from inside the building, and accentuates a sexuality underscored by the equally colorful lettering and the fire escape. The piece suggests that people once lived there, but like all New York apartment dwellers in close proximity with another, we wonder, but who is it. The remarkable piece, Walkway 24th and Seventh Avenue, duplicates a typical sidewalk construction scene in what seems a nearly impossible feat in three x 9 x12 inch dimensions.
Extending the use of her diorama scale and form to music boxes is effectively constructed in the aching mixed piece, Amazing Grace, which entails the viewer to wind the music box playing the song, Amazing Grace, while a toy white car circles a giant magnolia tree. The enormity of the magnolia tree, the state flower of Louisiana and Mississippi, has a far greater presence than the car driving around the tree below or the duplication of the store. In a short film version of this piece, Foretich reveals in voice-over that it is her father driving in the car from a store where he once bought her mother magnolias.
This incorporation of film into her work is a newer investigation into how the “intimacy” of her work might expand into “recognizing moments.” Pieces such as the humorous disco ball scene set to the sounds of heavy metal music, or the depiction of a remote Ozark room where a celebrity photo hangs in solitary confinement along with a case of beer reveal work that also delves into much larger de-romanticized visions of socio-economic factors or as Foretich notes “places that might…be forgotten.” There is a sense of profound loneliness in her pieces and solitude. Where Foretich’s work is so devastating is in its honesty and subtlety of composition. A respect for place, as Bachelard wrote, “…when memories of other places we have lived in come back to us, we travel to the land of Motionless Child, motionless the way of all immemorial things
