Margot Voorhies Thompson
This exhibition of work by Margot Voorhies Thompson, entitled Abstract City reflects on the transformation of place and its similarity to the shifts language can make through time. Similar to natural and urban landscapes, language has the ability to reinvent itself and adapt over time, or run to extinction. Witnessing the dramatic transformation of Portland over the past few decades, Thompson has found compelling parallels between the evolving qualities of language and the changing structure and appearance of the city's urban and cultural landscape. Her newest paintings and collages utilize her longstanding formal and abstract visual language of calligraphed shapes and intersecting forms to map and suggest the evolution of the urban world around us.
A Portland native, Margot Voorhies Thompson studied at Lewis and Clark College, Reed College, the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and at the Hocheschule 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. Most recently she has begun a commission for the Oregon State Hospital in Salem.