Margot Voorhies Thompson

This exhibition by Margot Voorhies Thompson, entitled Expedition and Freedom Walls II is an exploration of the theme of survival through transformation, reinvention and transcendence. Building on her last exhibition, her new work responds to the increased social and political tumult throughout the world, as people everywhere compete for their rights, for food, land and water. The ideas behind the work considers how the reordering of a natural environment can ultimately lead to life reasserting itself in new and unexpected ways. Thompson utilizes her longstanding formal and abstract visual language of calligraphed shapes and intersecting forms to reflect on the linguistic and expressive attempts humans make to describe, interpret and sometimes reshape life around them.

A Portland native, Margot Voorhies Thompson studied at Lewis and Clark College, Reed College, the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and at the Hochschule Fur Kunsterlische in Linz, Austria. Her work is in collections including the Portland Art Museum, the Stanford University Hospital, and the Printmaking Workshop in New York. Margot Thompson has completed several collaborative book commissions with Kim Stafford, Pattian Rogers, and Wendell Berry for the University of Oregon’s Knight Library Press. Other commissions include pieces for Oregon University of Health and Sciences, Portland; Portland State University; Kaiser Permanente, Tualatin, OR; the Woodstock Branch Multnomah County Library; and Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, both in Portland. Recently she completed a commission for the Oregon State Hospital in Salem.

Expedition and Freedom Walls II

November 1 – December 1, 2012

Press Release