Rebecca Forstater
On our News Blog we release features on our Paradice Palase members, spotlighting their practice and involvement in the arts community. This week, we had the chance to hear from Rebecca Forstater, a painter and teacher currently based out of South Carolina. Rebecca’s interdisciplinary work caught our attention because of the jarring familiarity of virtual references and interactive nature of their work. A bit more about Rebecca:
Rebecca Forstater (she/they) is a South Carolina based interdisciplinary artist whose work considers the production of current histories in digital landscapes. Featuring motifs of reality television banality, online community myth-making, and artificial transfiguration, Forstater’s work is presented through an aesthetic of lo-fi deepfake performances combining analog silicone masks and re-hashed digital video reminiscent of half-remembered internet memes from the past decade.
Forstater received her MFA from Syracuse University and her BFA from James Madison University. Their work has been exhibited internationally and nationally with most recent shows at Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Los Angeles), Unrequited Leisure (Nashville), Bunker Projects (Pittsburg), Governors Island (New York), Das Giftraum (Berlin), and Monte Vista Projects (Los Angeles). In addition to her individual art practice, Forstater is part of the art collective, Double Double Project is a co-founder and curator of Trophy Room Project Space. They have lectured internationally and have taught undergraduate and graduate courses at Syracuse University and Binghamton University. Currently, Forstater is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Wofford College and the Chair of Grants, Scholarships, and Finance at the New Media Caucus.
Her distinct ironic appropriation of celebrity culture manifests in the visceral feeling of being torn between repulsion and familiarity. Through the outward-facing aesthetic of tacky luxury and cliched reality television narrative, Forstater questions whether we can trust our own desires in a screen-based world.
PP: Where are you currently living/ working and what are you working on?
RF: I am currently packing up my house and studio in upstate New York to relocate to Spartanburg, South Carolina where I will be starting a new job as an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Wofford College. I've spent the last ten years in various parts of New York but am originally from Virginia, so this is an exciting change and I am looking forward to reconnecting with the vibrant arts communities in the southeast!
Right now, I am interested in reality television as a visual mirror for societal constructs and values at specific moments in time. I am working on creating an immersive video game archive of reality television that positions the player as both a cast member and a viewer, being implicated in this still-happening history while simultaneously looking at it voyeuristically. Through the process of making this digital work, sculptural works have emerged that highlight singular performative recreations that are housed in the video game.
I recently showed one of these sculptures at Tiger Strikes Astroid Los Angeles. The sculpture consists of a UV print on silicone of the deconstructed body of one of my video game characters. She is an AI mashup of all the winners of the Bachelorette. The stand the print is on points to the screen, which is an interactive augmented reality experience where the viewer becomes the "Woman Yelling at the Cat" meme. This meme came from a Real Housewives episode that was disturbing to anyone who remembered this moment from years ago of a woman in a real and scary crisis. This meme became incredibly popular to remix about ten years after it was first aired on TV, with users on the internet, who are mostly unaware of its origin, combining it with a cat and funny words. What does it mean to engage with it in both contexts? In digital culture, there is a gap in time embedded in viewing the past and present as one, holding tangible markers of both progress and continual societal shortcomings. For me, this work, and the forthcoming video game exist as a visceral feeling of being torn between sentimentality and fear. It is made in the same way that it's consumed, a wind tunnel of imagery, audio, and interactions that shapeshift moments in time.
PP: Who or what has had the biggest influence on your creative practice?
RF: I noticed a big shift in my creative practice after having a conversation with a mentor about what constitutes a sustainable practice - specifically we were talking about the interrelationship between research and making in my work. It was at the time that I began to more broadly consider the research I was doing unknowingly and bringing into the studio. For me, research isn't just reading, it is happening virtually all of the time as I watch TV or view/participate in interactions on the internet. For me, these casual activities are filled with complex socio-cultural interactions worth investigating.
PP: What body or piece of work of yours is your favorite, or the most meaningful to you?
RF: I love and hate all of my work equally, and that is honestly what keeps me making. No piece perfectly encapsulates a never-ending conversation and inevitably leads to another question, and then another work.
PP: What role do you think artists have in society?
RF: Before I define the role artists have in society, I want to first share a particular quote I think to be true of who can be considered an artist today because I believe it to be broader than it has been historically defined. In Artie Vierkant's essay "The Image Object Post Internet" he touches on this in the context of Post-Internet art, but I do think this applies to art in general in our current moment. He states,
"the most radical and “progressive” movements of the Post-Internet period would be those who either pass by either largely unnoticed due to a decision to opt-out of any easily-accessible distribution networks, or else would be composed of a community of people producing cultural objects not intended as artistic propositions and not applying themselves with the label of artist."
The undertaking of art-making is happening in traditional and nontraditional places, by people who may or may not consider themselves artists. I have seen equally incredible art on TikTok as I have in white cubes. With that in mind, I believe art is an act of critical undoing. It is the inquiry of frequencies unheard that emerge from the dissections of the past, reflections of the current, and possibilities of new futures. It is an investigation without absolute answers that ripples through our perceived reality.
