adam forrester
Forrester’s intriguing MFA installation for the 2013 thesis candidate exhibition is only a mile or so away at the Georgia Museum of Art. The Lamar Dodd School of Art’s Master of Fine Arts degree candidates’ exit show returned to the museum this year. His installation occupies its own, personal theater-like room. Within the theater are mysterious objects and a large screen, with a video running in a continual loop. The exhibit is a combination of video and artifacts that appear in the video. A mound of dirt is encased in a clear acrylic case. (Perhaps the only appearance ever of dirt in a museum, he muses.) Other encased items, including rope and a small orange gun, are displayed. A formal, white dinner jacket is draped upon one mannequin, and a pinkprinted men’s suit on another. It is all to suggest mystery, intrigue, more than a little irony, and, as Forrester says, polarity. In his MFA statement, he wrote that it depicts “the possibility of an obstacle
existing in a positive light and equalizes the futility between such concepts as utility and futility." For his MFA exit show, which is comprised of three discrete films, each features a different suit/costume which the actor (Forrester) wears and a distinct theme. He initially dreamt about “building a house, sleeping in it, and then burning it." He revised the house idea into a tent, which he burned in a Jefferson, Ga. field. Nearby on a tractor was the landowner—a farmer— who enjoyed the entire production. As the videos unfold, wood is chopped, stacked and then nailed. Things are dug up. Things are created and then burned. Forrester did it himself—the conceptualization, the hard labor, the acting, the filming. “It took two days for me to split the wood in one of them,” he says. Yet, as these things happen, the look of the video is fanciful and capricious, bewildering and beguiling, and lends nothing so much
as a strange play at nihilism. Is Forrester nodding to Fellini—or his friend, Camus—or both? Forrester laughs and joyfully discusses the whole enterprise—the farmer, the tent, the costumes, the elaborate creation, seeming to enjoy his Alice-in-Wonderland sleight of hand. He is shamelessly entertained by his playful use of pyrotechnics, brilliant color and graphics—alternated with sometimes sinister-seeming black and white grainy film. Yet here’s another thing that lingers a month, even two, after viewing Forrester’s show. An orange gun, a pink tent, and fire images lick at the psyche. If the art sometimes seems playful, or trivial, it isn’t. It’s simply hard to keep up with an artist whose imaginings are firing this quickly. Forrester appears to be having a punch at our slow wit: the brilliant pink-printed tent in his video winds up being set afire with a flare gun. Whatever we think a thing
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