Artist Bio:
Forrest Lawson is based outside of Washington DC, where they work independently as an artist as well as serve as the Printmaking and Letterpress Studio Manager at George Mason University. They have exhibited and garnered acclaim nationally and internationally, culminating in being named the Grand Prize winner of ArtFields in 2019 and a resident artist at Chautauqua Institution in 2022. Forrest's work is recognized for its exploration of Queer blood, delving into the complexities of queerness in the face of political and societal adversity. They received their Undergraduate Degree from The University of Central Florida and a Masters in Fine Arts from The University of Georgia, with interdisciplinary recognition amongst the arts and humanities which includes work within Gender Studies and Queer Theory as well as the visual arts. Forrest continues to address inequity amongst the intersections of oppression that affect the Queer community, and challenges, sometimes antagonistically, viewers to confront and reflect upon issues of identity, power, and liberation or their complicity in heterosupremacy.
Artist Statement:
Exploring the visual power and material significance of blood and the abject, as it relates to Queer bodies, is the primary focus of my research. Recently, I have become interested in disentangling a homogenized view of homophobia and how my experience with childhood abuse and neglect have informed my practice and (mis)understandings of heterosupremic models of oppression. Physical, emotional, and psychological abuses and my disowned queerness have collapsed on one another and do not operate as mutually exclusive sites of trauma. Concentrating on healing these wounds and gaining further understanding of the weaponized tools of homophobia are informing a new body of work titled The Sissy Boy and Heterosupremacy.
Drawing from feminist and queer theories, whereby the personal becomes political, the source of these subjective abuses is explored more thoroughly through sculpture, printmaking, and book arts that are informed by trauma therapies and memory recollection. The fallibility of memory, and more specifically the defensive mechanism that produces this fallibility, is explored further in the use of materiality and imagery that suggest these muddled restitchings. The use of transparency has also become a necessary surrogate for practiced vulnerability within C-PTSD recovery and as specter of a lost past. Likewise, cyclical depictions of self-pleasure relate to self-efficacy and emotional regulation after neglect during developmental years. The process of recall also produces a queered space through shifts in form and function as well as from overlayed abject viscera, bacterial colonies, and blood.
The nuances and esoteric use of blood and the abject can be understand through the theories of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, specifically through concepts of grievability and the pathologized associations of the Queer body; or the slippage between the subject/object relationship between hetero/homo sexual binaries. Compositionally, and through decomposition, a tension is created by fragmentation, subterfuge, and obscurity between a narrative of discovery, self and otherwise, and feelings of solidarity or empathy. Queerness removes itself from site, from body, and from experience and operates with autonomy as I begin to unravel its association to the primary foundation of abuse. What becomes of salted earth and when does it recover?
“Lawson’s approach to making work is like a quiet, confident knife cutting with deft clarity and certainty of intention. Using crisp order, poingant materials and clearly defined demarcations, his powerful and emotionally driven works nimbly move between cutting to the core of, or gently & often sardonically, skinning the surface of painful narratives experienced both personally and as a part of the universal human condition. ”