Bookworks
Fluctuating between autobiographical and science fiction, Forrest remains curious about the terror of the sociological systems that oppose and suppress the psychology of individuality. Both metaphysical and paraphysical pathways of gender and sexual reclamation remain present. This trauma mediation joins many deeply troubling human conditions. The correlation lays within the intimacy of alienation, the perceptions may vary but the disruption of one’s identity as a sacrifice for security is shared. This collection of books acts as an appendage to her art practice, it is within the art of words that innumerable meanings breathe.
The Imaginary Imagination
2023
Found objects, airbrush acrylic paint, silicone castings, hair of the artist, and other mixed media through hand
7" x 10.5" x 3.37"
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This book, titled The Imaginary Imagination contains a collection of vulnerable autobiographical accounts that embody themes that consider identity dysphoria, perception fabrications, mnemonic memory retrieval, power dynamics, sensory perception, gender assimilation, and sexual autonomy in relation to childhood, adolescent, and adult trauma. This first edition single hardcopy book works to dissect the anatomy of the imagination by separating each chapter into fragments; curiosity, survival, anxiety, hallucination, queerness, love, dreaming, and abandonment. Each chapter contains multiple stories and each one stresses an imagination disruptor. Just as in Forrest’s art practice, she endeavors to probe and enlarge the human understanding of what identity embodies by assessing ambivalent human exchange and the unspoken interactions between them. Her writing functions as a stream of conscious and subconscious thought, that ranges from overt to obscure, shaped around memories.
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To read this book, purchase the second edition ebook on Google Play Books
Dystopia: A Visual Anthology
The Chair
2023 | 15.63" x 26.04"
Book - 60 Pages | Entry - 10 pages
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The chair is a science fiction short story that captures disempowerment within the systems that have constructed human condition. Based in a realm where the conscious mind can perceive the metaphysical and paraphysical, the narrative embodies the subconscious mind's absurd and abject nature. Through ambiguous visual language, The Chair comments on the complacent security that we conform to -- which results in anti-autonomous reality.
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If our autonomy was arrested, we'd continue to live within the rumination of the conscious mind and the protective space of our subconscious. We'd conduct the metaphysical within the paraphysical that lives behind our tired closed eyes. Our imagination, memories, thoughts, observations, and dreams would nurture our subservient bodies. Nourishing our will to live and breathe.
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To read the chair, please click here.
You Dream my Dream
2024 | 61mb
Audiobook - 5 minutes 56 seconds
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You dream my dream represents the tempo of fragmented memory behavior. Influenced by the complex emotions connected to my estranged father’s recent news that he is dying, this piece unfolds memory retrieval behavior. The audio work is separated into four segments, a song parody, disrupting memories of lightness and darkness, and perception merging. It hones in on music, objects, and moments that capture the duality of love and pain existing through mental spaces. Music that connects to sentimental imagery, specifically Supertramp, acts as a thread feeding together memories that have abandoned the self. When a song is reversed, I attempt to rewind reality. I’m extracting from the forgotten by collecting the sounds of mnemonic objects. All the sounds were pulled from my home to connect to my former home. My daughter's voice was incorporated to embody the power of neglect, as time with her grandfather erases. I’m using the whisper to capture the feeling of something being present and present-less.
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To listen to You Dream my Dream please click here.
Dream Space: The story that hasn't happened
2024
Found objects and artist's hair
4" x 2.5" x 0.4"
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Titled Dream Space, this book examines where fantasy and reality meet in the context of a non-monogamous relationship. Side A, written on the left side, speaks to fantasy, and Side B, written on the right side, represents reality. The labeled sides on the cassette tape have been removed, to speak to the indistinguishable behavior of fantasy and reality. The focal perception shifts through the anti-narrative to speak from the perspective of the sensory, room, object, body, emotions, absurdity, and abject. In the spirit of the project's theme of spatiality, I play with different meanings of the word space and spatially animate the text to embellish specific moments. This work contemplates What space does a dream occupy? How does someone unlearn monogamy? and the advantages and challenges of a non-monogamous relationship, including its relationship with ethics.
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To read this book, purchase the second edition ebook on Google Play Books
Velvet Ear
2024
Found objects
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Velvet Ear is a, autobiographically inspired, psychological science fiction telling the story of Landry Knox and Gretchen Grim falling in love and moving into a basement apartment. Mr. Knox, Landry's father, lives upstairs. The unit has a curtain instead of a front door. The narrative emerges out of tensions between two floors. With a traumatic history of being estranged, Gretchen finds comfort in building a daughterly bond with Mr. Knox. After a dark miscarriage, Landry and Gretchen psychologically decline which results in a second pregnancy. Landry is eager to be a father, while Gretchen is apprehensive and disconnected. Sounds of moaning, high heels, and the smacking of bare feet running away materialize from upstairs which ignites time. Mr. Knox begins to invade Landry and Gretchen sexually, psychologically, and physically. His voyeuristic tendencies begin to play with the hallucinations of Landry as a young boy. A gaslighting element stands out when Mr. Knox denies his behavior, bringing doubt and strain to Landry and Gretchen's relationship -- which leads to blaming one another. The question of whether this is happening or not becomes answered when they purchase a camera but remains unknown to the reader.
Routine-oriented and lonely, Mr. Knox reacts maladaptively toward the changes from the divorce with Landry's mother. Mr. Knox renovated the house to look like the home Landry grew up in and he starts drinking heavily. Mr. Knox has a secret alter ego that cross-dressed and performed maternal tasks, a suggested result of trauma connected to his mother and sibling. This veil of secrecy becomes more opaque as the story unfolds, but also becomes more ambiguous to heighten the fear of uncertainty. Questions emerge regarding the validity of intention, resulting in a moral dilemma for the reader. The book ends by requesting the reader to go back to the beginning. This connects back to the opening epigraph written by Albert Camus, "A man defines himself by his make-believe as well as his sincere impulses."
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To read this book, purchase the second edition ebook on Google Play Books
The Room
2024 | 2 pages
Short Story
Found objects and Silicone​
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The Room is an autobiographical short story that proposes deconstruction of self-awareness. Reflecting on the power of memory, it dives into vulnerability to resurface in space of fragmentation awareness.
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To read My Room, please click here.​
Eyes Open in the Dark
2024 | 65 pages
Master of Fine Arts, Monographic Dissertation
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An unusual dissertation that presents a science fiction autobiographical narrative, following a trial of trauma and identity dysphoria. Through a trans-queer biological female lens, the vulnerable tone of the author invites the reader into wording that describes matters they will care for on a human level. This study probes the question of what lives within the silence of our perceptions by appraising reverberations between interactions that coerce the human condition. Interrogating memory is inevitable when questioning how defense mechanisms interrelate and adapt to human needs. This study penetrates the complexities of perception fabrications, power dynamics, sensory perceptions, systemic moralities, and passivity. The following is a written account of human absurdity that considers abjection as applied to the metaphysical and paraphysical pathways of gender and sexual reclamation. The objective is to guide vulnerable self-acknowledgments and activate purposeful settlement.
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To read Eyes Open in the Dark, please click here.