
Mike McGovern
Artist Statement and Bio
Michael Edward McGovern
7807 SE Cesar E. Chavez Blvd
Portland, Oregon 97202
(503) 544-7217
mike.mcgovern15@pcc.edu
mem3@pdx.edu
The environments and people that have surrounded my life inform the art I create. My work is about constructing autobiographical images that explore the ghosts and spirits of my past. I am interested in how both personal and cultural histories have profoundly affected my visual language.
I compose memorials to the intangible memories of my past. By visually recording impressions of specific times, places, and events in my life I am preserving memories that seem to fade with each passing year.
My work calls upon the repetitive nature of printmaking and photography to create a network of reoccurring images that I can meditate on to help search for a truth. I use a lexicon of images that relate to specific events in my history. Repeated images of bridges, birds, trains, war, masks, urban landscapes, and old family portraits find their way into my work lending themselves to an unfolding narrative. All these images carry a personal biography, but also carry the weight of their own metaphors helping to furnish an ever-growing personal narrative. Michael Edward McGovern 2015
Michael McGovern currently lives in Portland Oregon and teaches printmaking and drawing at Portland Community College and printmaking at Portland State University. McGovern was born and raised in Portland Oregon where he received his BFA in Photography from the Pacific NW College of Art in 2004. In 2009 McGoven received his MFA in Printmaking from Northern Illinois University.