float - Novermber 8-15 2006
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Shane Forrest: Float A-Space on Cleveland, Sydney Novermber 8-15, 2006 by Tracey Clement Like every adolescent boy that has ever fantasised about owing a pair of X-ray specs, Shane Forrest has imagined peering through the walls of other’s peoples houses. In Float, Forrest depicts a bug’s eye view of what goes on behind closed doors in an average suburban Aussie street. And, just as twelve year old boys everywhere have always suspected, the couples inside are getting down to business.Of course this really comes as no surprise. All serious students of pop culture know that cul-de-sac culture is a hot bed of sex. We read all about it in the steamed-up pages of pulp fiction or in more highbrow tales of a bored and lascivious middle class by literary luminaries such as John Updike. In paintings of cosy and familiar rooms, Balthus draped young girls in seductive poses over upholstered furniture, while in Edward Hopper’s sun drenched interiors everyone seems transfixed by a kind of post-coital melancholy. From the manicured lawns of TV’s Desperate Housewives, to Charlotte Haze’s modest backyard in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, or Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, the landscape of the burbs is made for love, or something like it. Shane Forrest adds another chapter to this tradition, treading the tricky, and well-trodden, fine line between art and pornography. In the majority of his thirty views of typical Sydney homes, couples are doing the wild thing. If nobody is home, sex is usually still on the agenda: porno plays on the telly, or collaged novelty playing cards left lying around give full frontal views of bodacious babes fingering themselves. Each of Forrest’s artworks resembles a doll’s house post-cyclone: collapsed, flattened, and skewed. Some are literally folded into sculptural wall hangings, while others are two dimensional works on paper, but all of them afford simultaneous glimpses of interior and exterior. Forrest combines layers of painting, drawing, photography and collage to accentuate his visual strategy of multiple perspectives. In the tradition of Indian/Pakistani miniature panting, he has paid loving attention to decorative surfaces. Brick walls, fake wood panelling, chequerboard lino, Persian carpets and floral wallpapers are rendered in detail and sometimes supplemented by swatches of the real thing. Forrest also takes care to point out each home’s assets, from two car garages to spacious bathrooms and built-in swimming pools.In fact, the titles in Float, phrases like Semi Detached Original Features, Old World Charm, Over Sized Living Under-priced Luxury, read like a list of real estate huckster clichés. Forrest clearly has a cheeky sense of humour and a social conscience. He seems intent on poking fun at a property obsessed middle class, keen on ‘keeping up with the Jones’ by conspicuously displaying one more satellite dish, BMW, or shabby chic renovation; a morally deficient culture that defines itself by what it consumes rather than its ideals.Maybe Forrest’s frisky couples are a reminder that there are more important things in life, things like love, lust and making babies? Interestingly, the work titled Our House is one of the most chaste. Nobody is home at Forrest's house, and nothing remotely saucy is going on. Perhaps he has neighbours who bang the bed-springs at full volume 24/7, driving him to a raging, jealous insomnia, and these works are a form of catharsis? Then again Forrest may just be fixated on sex. Either way, I find it unnerving that in Forrest’s work, only heterosexuals seem to be getting any action. Although some women are seeing to themselves, leaving their sexual orientation open to interpretation, there aren’t any same sex pairings, or even men flying solo, a statistical improbability to say the very least. Are there no loved up queers in Forrest’s virtual community? And, call me old-fashioned, but Forrest’s tiny portraits of people in Karma Sutra poses distract me from the quirky charm and political subtlety of his complex compositions. But I guess sex is distracting, maybe this is the point?
MEDIA RELEASE
FLOATShane Forrest8 to 25 November 2006
The title of this latest exhibition by Shane Forrest, FLOAT, is in part a reference to the erotic ‘floating world’ of Japanese woodblock prints. Shane Forrest in his non-artist life teaches Japanese. In many of these dissected observations of very ordinary suburban houses, so typical of Forrest’s home suburb of Leichhardt, floats a couple having sex amongst a kaleidoscope of interior wall papers, rugs, tiles, curtains and other patterned furnishings that is a reflection of the everyday banality of our lives.
Amusingly his titles allude to the advertising phrases and quips that real estate agents love to use to sell houses. For example ‘Cosy Cottage Feel’ and ‘Delightful Brick Veneer’. Forrest conflates the title and image to allude to the mantra ‘sex sells’ which he sees is subliminal in most real estate advertising.
However in these collaged, painted and often three dimensional works, Forrest celebrates the notion of home as a refuge a ‘castle’ despite or even because of its kitsch wonderfulness. Rooves bristle with equipment to trap floating transmissions, breezes and sunlight. The flayed interiors reveal dizzying patterned surfaces where couples, seemingly unobserved, play out their lives in living room or bedroom, by the bar heater or in the glare of a television set. In fractured, pop-up compositions Forrest gives a nod to Persian miniature painting with its vertical perspective and lively patterning.
This catalogue of suburban architecture with its erotic undertones is both highly amusing and an insightful observation into what makes Sydney more than the bland landscape that it sometimes seems.
Previous exhibitions at A – SPACE on Cleveland and in the Sydney Opera House foyer have been very popular and this collection of new works is sure to be just as rewarding.
The exhibition runs from Wed 8 to Sat 25 November 2006. The opening of the exhibition will be on Wednesday 8 November from 6 to 8 pmThe gallery is open from Wednesday to Saturday 10 am to 5.30 pm
Media Inquiries: Pam Blondel Telephone/Fax: 9698 5156 Mobile: 0418 239 244 Gallery Hours: 10am – 5.30 pm Wednesday to Saturday
FLOATShane Forrest8 to 25 November 2006
The title of this latest exhibition by Shane Forrest, FLOAT, is in part a reference to the erotic ‘floating world’ of Japanese woodblock prints. Shane Forrest in his non-artist life teaches Japanese. In many of these dissected observations of very ordinary suburban houses, so typical of Forrest’s home suburb of Leichhardt, floats a couple having sex amongst a kaleidoscope of interior wall papers, rugs, tiles, curtains and other patterned furnishings that is a reflection of the everyday banality of our lives.
Amusingly his titles allude to the advertising phrases and quips that real estate agents love to use to sell houses. For example ‘Cosy Cottage Feel’ and ‘Delightful Brick Veneer’. Forrest conflates the title and image to allude to the mantra ‘sex sells’ which he sees is subliminal in most real estate advertising.
However in these collaged, painted and often three dimensional works, Forrest celebrates the notion of home as a refuge a ‘castle’ despite or even because of its kitsch wonderfulness. Rooves bristle with equipment to trap floating transmissions, breezes and sunlight. The flayed interiors reveal dizzying patterned surfaces where couples, seemingly unobserved, play out their lives in living room or bedroom, by the bar heater or in the glare of a television set. In fractured, pop-up compositions Forrest gives a nod to Persian miniature painting with its vertical perspective and lively patterning.
This catalogue of suburban architecture with its erotic undertones is both highly amusing and an insightful observation into what makes Sydney more than the bland landscape that it sometimes seems.
Previous exhibitions at A – SPACE on Cleveland and in the Sydney Opera House foyer have been very popular and this collection of new works is sure to be just as rewarding.
The exhibition runs from Wed 8 to Sat 25 November 2006. The opening of the exhibition will be on Wednesday 8 November from 6 to 8 pmThe gallery is open from Wednesday to Saturday 10 am to 5.30 pm
Media Inquiries: Pam Blondel Telephone/Fax: 9698 5156 Mobile: 0418 239 244 Gallery Hours: 10am – 5.30 pm Wednesday to Saturday