reviews AND CATALOGUE ESSAYS
2022
Associate Professor Joanne Mendelssohn - ART ALMANAC, August 2022
Francis Bacon famously claimed that all art was about “sex and death”, but Shane Forrest has a more nuanced vision. His art is a constant examination of “entropy and the fight against it”.
Forrest is the most economical of artists. The canvases on which he paints are found abandoned on streets. Most of the Arches paper he uses for his paintings comes from his old friend, Guy Warren, who gives him paper he has discarded. Nothing is wasted. All is transformed.
This is especially true of the brochures from real estate agents which stuff our letterboxes, their glossy pictures and hyperbolic weasel words transforming mediocrity into fantasy. If the brochures are not quickly removed, snails, worms and insects find them and they are eaten away. Entropy.
Shane Forrest has found a use for brochures other than as food for other forms of life or the council’s recycling bin. He takes them, tears them up and reassembles them in ways that the agents could never imagine. The reconstructed works are then sealed with acrylic matte varnish before being repainted in gouache, neatly boxed to make the most enticing of images. Their titles come from the source material: In an admired enclave, Sitting above a vibrant retail piazza and Boasting a sunny rear yard.
In his large paintings Forrest undertakes an even greater transformation of the property market’s fantasy. Each work is based on a real estate advertisement for a single house. Their titles also come from the weasel words of real estate marketing: Standing proudly within an exclusive streetscape, Plenty of character to sooth the soul and No neighbours here plus a large shed. The glossed up images created by the agents and their stylists are transformed into exquisite, intensely coloured acrylic paintings of three of them, painted on Arches paper. One is selected to be transferred to canvas. The next is layered over it, and torn – the rough white tear is incorporated into the design. Then the third torn image adds another layer of complexity. These fragments create a dislocated vision of the absurd fantasy the market is promoting, a transformation in destruction. Permanence is an artificial construct.
The art historian and art critic Joanna Mendelssohn has long admired Shane Forrest’s work.
Forrest is the most economical of artists. The canvases on which he paints are found abandoned on streets. Most of the Arches paper he uses for his paintings comes from his old friend, Guy Warren, who gives him paper he has discarded. Nothing is wasted. All is transformed.
This is especially true of the brochures from real estate agents which stuff our letterboxes, their glossy pictures and hyperbolic weasel words transforming mediocrity into fantasy. If the brochures are not quickly removed, snails, worms and insects find them and they are eaten away. Entropy.
Shane Forrest has found a use for brochures other than as food for other forms of life or the council’s recycling bin. He takes them, tears them up and reassembles them in ways that the agents could never imagine. The reconstructed works are then sealed with acrylic matte varnish before being repainted in gouache, neatly boxed to make the most enticing of images. Their titles come from the source material: In an admired enclave, Sitting above a vibrant retail piazza and Boasting a sunny rear yard.
In his large paintings Forrest undertakes an even greater transformation of the property market’s fantasy. Each work is based on a real estate advertisement for a single house. Their titles also come from the weasel words of real estate marketing: Standing proudly within an exclusive streetscape, Plenty of character to sooth the soul and No neighbours here plus a large shed. The glossed up images created by the agents and their stylists are transformed into exquisite, intensely coloured acrylic paintings of three of them, painted on Arches paper. One is selected to be transferred to canvas. The next is layered over it, and torn – the rough white tear is incorporated into the design. Then the third torn image adds another layer of complexity. These fragments create a dislocated vision of the absurd fantasy the market is promoting, a transformation in destruction. Permanence is an artificial construct.
The art historian and art critic Joanna Mendelssohn has long admired Shane Forrest’s work.
Dr J Naylor with assistance from Dr C Forrest- CATALOGUE ESSAY , May 2022
With subject matter sourced from current real estate advertisements these paintings poke at the hyper-heated Sydney real estate situation. Tasked with devising a title for this exhibition of works, my scientist son and I agreed that at an intrinsic level in these paintings present multiple views of the same address separated by space, but not time. This notion called to mind the the quantum phenomenon called Entanglement. While my level of grasp on quantum physics is feeble, his fortunately is more robust, and since Forrest's self-proclaimed view of these works is encapsulated in musings around impermanence, using Entanglement as a metaphor appeared in a 'high energy collision'! This phenomena, produced in quantum experiments, of particles miles from each other in our physical world instantaneously exchanging information gave Albert Einstein the creeps and he referred to this feature of quantum mechanics as “spooky action at a distance”. Thus, the title for this exhibition: 'Spooky Action at an Address'. . The works in 'Spooky Action at an Address' are acrylic on reclaimed paper and reclaimed canvas. That is to say that Forrest endeavours to source paper that, while of good quality, has been discarded for its original purpose and canvases that similarly have found a dead end and so, environmental demands are minimised in production of these works. Separate paintings of selected rooms in the same house are firstly painted, and then these are dismembered and interlaced. Simultaneous viewing is made possible with interwoven layers.
Using Entanglement as a metaphor to view and translate these works, the compositions provide a straightforward entry point. Produced by ripping and reassembling these are readily describable as entangled images. However, in the same manner that Cubist used a two dimensional painted surface to a postulate a four dimensional experience, to only see the visual entanglement is to forego a more invigorating mental workout
So here is where I briefly insert what I have gleaned about Entanglement for consideration as a ‘spooky’ lens through which to view this exhibition:- “Entanglement arises in situations where we have partial knowledge of the state of two systems, knowing the shape of one, we can infer the shape of the other with certainty” - such “partial knowledge” is visible in the selected remains of complete painted layer chosen to represent each room, and which together inform the viewer of the whole residence. “One way to create an entangled state is to make a measurement of your (composite) system that gives you partial information. No one view of physical reality captures all its aspects; one must take into account many different, mutually exclusive views, each offering valid but partial insight. This is the heart of complementarity…”- applying this to Forrest’s work, partial views of physical reality represent a fuller description than any of the layers taken alone.
“We say we have “entangled histories” when it is impossible to assign a definite state to our system at each moment in time. Similarly to how we got conventional entanglement by eliminating some possibilities, we can create entangled histories by making measurements that gather partial information about what happened…. our observations leave both alternatives in play.” - the parts of each layer that are eliminated, not included, do exist and remain somewhere in play.
“Everyday language is ill suited to describe quantum complementarity…that we take both of two contradictory property-trajectories into account.” - contradictory conceptual content is well housed and plausibly proposed by visual means. In this regard, Forrest’s work sits comfortably in a crowded pantheon. “The controlled experimental realization of entangled histories…. can give definite mathematical and experimental meaning to the proliferation of “many worlds” in quantum theory, and demonstrate its substantiality.” - and so, Forrest's works may be considered as controlled experiments in multidimensionality and the nature of substance. Being quantum in nature, Forrest achieves his own ‘spooky action’ at an address. Quotes and thanks to Frank Wilczek, Entanglement made simple https://www.quantamagazine.org/entanglement-made-simple-20160428/
Using Entanglement as a metaphor to view and translate these works, the compositions provide a straightforward entry point. Produced by ripping and reassembling these are readily describable as entangled images. However, in the same manner that Cubist used a two dimensional painted surface to a postulate a four dimensional experience, to only see the visual entanglement is to forego a more invigorating mental workout
So here is where I briefly insert what I have gleaned about Entanglement for consideration as a ‘spooky’ lens through which to view this exhibition:- “Entanglement arises in situations where we have partial knowledge of the state of two systems, knowing the shape of one, we can infer the shape of the other with certainty” - such “partial knowledge” is visible in the selected remains of complete painted layer chosen to represent each room, and which together inform the viewer of the whole residence. “One way to create an entangled state is to make a measurement of your (composite) system that gives you partial information. No one view of physical reality captures all its aspects; one must take into account many different, mutually exclusive views, each offering valid but partial insight. This is the heart of complementarity…”- applying this to Forrest’s work, partial views of physical reality represent a fuller description than any of the layers taken alone.
“We say we have “entangled histories” when it is impossible to assign a definite state to our system at each moment in time. Similarly to how we got conventional entanglement by eliminating some possibilities, we can create entangled histories by making measurements that gather partial information about what happened…. our observations leave both alternatives in play.” - the parts of each layer that are eliminated, not included, do exist and remain somewhere in play.
“Everyday language is ill suited to describe quantum complementarity…that we take both of two contradictory property-trajectories into account.” - contradictory conceptual content is well housed and plausibly proposed by visual means. In this regard, Forrest’s work sits comfortably in a crowded pantheon. “The controlled experimental realization of entangled histories…. can give definite mathematical and experimental meaning to the proliferation of “many worlds” in quantum theory, and demonstrate its substantiality.” - and so, Forrest's works may be considered as controlled experiments in multidimensionality and the nature of substance. Being quantum in nature, Forrest achieves his own ‘spooky action’ at an address. Quotes and thanks to Frank Wilczek, Entanglement made simple https://www.quantamagazine.org/entanglement-made-simple-20160428/
2021
Jim Anderson
2019
Art Almanac - Shane Forrest: 25 Years / 13 August 2019
Shane Forrest: 25 Years13 August 2019 | Art AlmanacTwenty-five years of Shane Forrest’s multidisciplinary practice is on display at Rogue Pop Up Gallery in Newtown. Forrest has been working with urban elements since the early 1980s and creates both 2D and 3D works informed by his environment and its inhabitants. He is interested in representing Sydney’s obsession with real estate and the often-unattainable dream of home ownership, particularly in his series ‘Porous Suburb’. Pulling imagery from the real estate promotions that fill his letterbox, Forrest creates delicate painted domestic scenes and reassembles them into collages that reveal multiple layers at once. The viewer can see both the exterior and interior of these Sydney houses, their carefully managed images disrupted and reimagined by Forrest, and the result only exacerbates their unattainability.
IMAGE Estate FinalisationShane Forrest, Estate Finalisation 2014, reclaimed paper and canvas, acrylic paint, 61 x 51cm
Reclaimed slabs of street posters are his material of choice for the series ‘Consumer Robusta’, in which he works as an archeologist of paper to peel back layers of historical street art and advertising and redefine their imagery. His interest in the discarded and abandoned is a pillar of his practice, as Forrest produces his work with mainly reclaimed materials including old brushes and palettes and found canvases, paper and cardboard.
IMAGE Aldi at 4amShane Forrest, Aldi at 4am 2016, Aldi brochures, reclaimed wood, varnish, 72 x 40 x 40cm
The aesthetic of dilapidation and destruction is carried on in his sculptural works, with many exploring a failure to be contained or controlled within themselves, while others are the aftermath of a rupture or explosion. Forrest uses the violence of these processes to give the viewer direct access to the inner layers of meaning imbued in his works.
Rogue Pop Up Gallery21 August to 8 September 2019Sydney https://www.art-almanac.com.au/shane-forrest-25-years/
IMAGE Estate FinalisationShane Forrest, Estate Finalisation 2014, reclaimed paper and canvas, acrylic paint, 61 x 51cm
Reclaimed slabs of street posters are his material of choice for the series ‘Consumer Robusta’, in which he works as an archeologist of paper to peel back layers of historical street art and advertising and redefine their imagery. His interest in the discarded and abandoned is a pillar of his practice, as Forrest produces his work with mainly reclaimed materials including old brushes and palettes and found canvases, paper and cardboard.
IMAGE Aldi at 4amShane Forrest, Aldi at 4am 2016, Aldi brochures, reclaimed wood, varnish, 72 x 40 x 40cm
The aesthetic of dilapidation and destruction is carried on in his sculptural works, with many exploring a failure to be contained or controlled within themselves, while others are the aftermath of a rupture or explosion. Forrest uses the violence of these processes to give the viewer direct access to the inner layers of meaning imbued in his works.
Rogue Pop Up Gallery21 August to 8 September 2019Sydney https://www.art-almanac.com.au/shane-forrest-25-years/
2007
Tracey Clement, March 2007
Shane Forrest: Float A-Space on Cleveland Sydney November 8-15, 2006
Tracey Clement
March 2007
SHANE FORREST is an urban archaeologist of paper. In his solo show, Deface, the Sydney artist peels huge slabs of layered posters from power poles and the sides of buildings, then excavates them to see what lies beneath.
Forrest carefully slices and aggressively tears into thick chunks of posters. The results of this inquisitive probing resemble streetwise geological samples with a pop-art edge. Colourful layers of strata are exposed, revealing the city's not-so-distant entertainment and advertising past.
Some famous faces are still recognisable despite being scarred by the artist's investigations. In Foxy Joan, '80s small-screen queen Joan Collins, as immortalised by art great Andy Warhol, is pierced by hundreds of dots. Niko Bellic, the square-jawed thug from video game Grand Theft Auto IV, glowers at himself in Dual Duel. In Hunted, his face is peeled back to reveal painted glistening steaks, his inner meathead.
Elsewhere in Deface, Forrest adds as well as subtracts. In Busy, a pretty boy, who may or may not be a young version of Aussie actor Matt Day, has a swarm of glittery beetle stickers covering his face.
In Sink, Forrest pumps up the volume on the advertising industry's already deafening rallying cry "Sex sells". He reduces a huge poster of a woman to just a giant mouth, flipped sideways - so that her parted glistening lips are highly suggestive of another body part - and surrounded by a collage of hundreds of obsessively cut-out, brightly coloured paper daisies. Forrest seems to have created a shrine devoted to a capricious fertility goddess. Her gaping mouth full of huge white teeth promises both pleasure and pain. https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/shane-forrest-deface-20081114-gdt2r8.html
Forrest carefully slices and aggressively tears into thick chunks of posters. The results of this inquisitive probing resemble streetwise geological samples with a pop-art edge. Colourful layers of strata are exposed, revealing the city's not-so-distant entertainment and advertising past.
Some famous faces are still recognisable despite being scarred by the artist's investigations. In Foxy Joan, '80s small-screen queen Joan Collins, as immortalised by art great Andy Warhol, is pierced by hundreds of dots. Niko Bellic, the square-jawed thug from video game Grand Theft Auto IV, glowers at himself in Dual Duel. In Hunted, his face is peeled back to reveal painted glistening steaks, his inner meathead.
Elsewhere in Deface, Forrest adds as well as subtracts. In Busy, a pretty boy, who may or may not be a young version of Aussie actor Matt Day, has a swarm of glittery beetle stickers covering his face.
In Sink, Forrest pumps up the volume on the advertising industry's already deafening rallying cry "Sex sells". He reduces a huge poster of a woman to just a giant mouth, flipped sideways - so that her parted glistening lips are highly suggestive of another body part - and surrounded by a collage of hundreds of obsessively cut-out, brightly coloured paper daisies. Forrest seems to have created a shrine devoted to a capricious fertility goddess. Her gaping mouth full of huge white teeth promises both pleasure and pain. https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/shane-forrest-deface-20081114-gdt2r8.html
2006
Tracey Clement: aRTLINK
Article Indexhttp://www.artlink.com.au/articles.cfm?id=2944Shane Forrest
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?
https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/2944/shane-forrest/
2004
Dominique Angeloro- smh
oPERA hOUSE gALLERY
Joan of Art October 8, 2004Miss Collins goes under the knife in Shane Forrest's poster-inspired show. Dominique Angeloro reports.OUTSIDE INTERFERENCEWhere: A-Space on Cleveland, 420 Cleveland Street, Surry HillsWhen: Wednesday-Saturday, 10am-5.30pm, until October 16More information: 9698 5156
It's not often you get to view art fitting for the design of an '80s sweatshirt. But the giddy colour assault of Shane Forrest's exhibition Outside Interference provides such a joy. This solo show at A-Space on Cleveland is a combination of attention-seizing works on paper and a series of perforated wooden sculptures. Forrest is a Sydney artist who scavenges public spaces for billboard posters, which he gathers into orderly heaps. Then he slices into the thick piles in search of visual riches. The resulting compositions could be thought of as delirious maps of popular culture. Curiously, much of the excavated paper is fluorescent, marking all the works with a dizzy mix of clashing colour. The artist deliberately flirts with overkill, at times even embedding his eye-candy compositions with found items such as a chocolate wrapper. But what's particularly interesting about these poster works is that Forrest experiments with a variety of methods of paper mutilation.
The surface has been roughly torn away in works such as Data Ribbons and Broadcast. They resemble rugged flags, with horizontal strips ripped from their surfaces producing jagged bands of colour.However, in other instances Forrest displays an obsessive attention to detail, engraving intricate patterns with carefully controlled scalpel incisions. In Rolling Joan, a poster of an Andy Warhol screen print is posed as the surface image of the work. Joan Collins's face has been cut into, with severe slivers of paper extracted from the image. The decorative contours seem laced with violence, winking at Collins's love affair with the cosmetic surgeon's knife.
Alternatively, a number of works have been embellished with cut-out daisy shapes that recall the craftiness of floral decoupage. In All Over Pattern Cuppa, Forrest turns up his kitsch value by constructing a three-dimensional cup and saucer out of these daisy chains.The freestanding sculptural pieces that accompany the wall works continue Forrest's aesthetic obsession with pierced surfaces and dissolving boundaries. These works are model mock-ups of proposed large-scale sculptural projects. Crafted from punctured panels of white painted wood, these forms appear to take inspiration from disintegrated human silhouettes.
https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/joan-of-art-20041008-gdjvlf.html
Outside Interference at the Opera House Gallery
When Shane Forrest was a boy, televisions weren’t the sleek commodities they are in 2004. Reception was variable and the screened image was prone to disintegrate into rolling distortion. This flickering corruption of the image made a profound impact - several decades later the artist cites the televisual dysfunction as a major influence on the perceptual processes at work in his large-scale collages.
More precisely, Forrest’s idiosyncratic practice relies not only on collage, but also on the much rarer French tradition of de-collage, or cutting into the paper layers. The artist chooses to re-work scavenged street and billboard posters. Consequently there is a deliciously random quality to Forrest’s subject matter, as it reflects what he’s been able to find on Sydney’s hoardings and streets.
Sydney Morning Herald art critic Dominique Angeloro recently pronounced Forrest’s Outside Interference series as ‘delirious maps of popular culture’. In the current series, pop star of the moment Holly Valance features in Holly Holly Holly and also Six Eyes and Two Mouths, while popular culture perennial Joan Collins is transformed in Rolling Joan. And they are indeed ‘delirious’ –densely built layers of paper are torn and cut into so that in the case of Six Eyes and Two Mouths, the pop princess’s features disintegrate. The iconic Warhol poster which forms the basis of Rolling Joan remains recognisable, nevertheless Forrest’s knife has inscribed it with curving ribbons of colour – transforming the pop icon into an ‘op pop’ icon.
Forrest sees his collage/de-collage practice as an extension of painting, which he describes as a matter of ‘layering and scratching away’. His interest in the ‘tension between ground and figure’, and his ‘drive to integrate the two’ reflect a couple of timeless concerns for painters. We would do well to remember that these strangely alluring works which force reflection on perceptual and optical processes have their origins in a 1960s rolling television screen.
When Shane Forrest was a boy, televisions weren’t the sleek commodities they are in 2004. Reception was variable and the screened image was prone to disintegrate into rolling distortion. This flickering corruption of the image made a profound impact - several decades later the artist cites the televisual dysfunction as a major influence on the perceptual processes at work in his large-scale collages.
More precisely, Forrest’s idiosyncratic practice relies not only on collage, but also on the much rarer French tradition of de-collage, or cutting into the paper layers. The artist chooses to re-work scavenged street and billboard posters. Consequently there is a deliciously random quality to Forrest’s subject matter, as it reflects what he’s been able to find on Sydney’s hoardings and streets.
Sydney Morning Herald art critic Dominique Angeloro recently pronounced Forrest’s Outside Interference series as ‘delirious maps of popular culture’. In the current series, pop star of the moment Holly Valance features in Holly Holly Holly and also Six Eyes and Two Mouths, while popular culture perennial Joan Collins is transformed in Rolling Joan. And they are indeed ‘delirious’ –densely built layers of paper are torn and cut into so that in the case of Six Eyes and Two Mouths, the pop princess’s features disintegrate. The iconic Warhol poster which forms the basis of Rolling Joan remains recognisable, nevertheless Forrest’s knife has inscribed it with curving ribbons of colour – transforming the pop icon into an ‘op pop’ icon.
Forrest sees his collage/de-collage practice as an extension of painting, which he describes as a matter of ‘layering and scratching away’. His interest in the ‘tension between ground and figure’, and his ‘drive to integrate the two’ reflect a couple of timeless concerns for painters. We would do well to remember that these strangely alluring works which force reflection on perceptual and optical processes have their origins in a 1960s rolling television screen.