Joe Forte
Joe Forte: AMERICAN WALLPAPER
Opening Reception: Friday, June 7, 2024, 5-8pm
My work is about glaring imperfection, repurposed into beauty. Things ripped up or discarded, put back together. Reassembling old narratives, turning them into new ones.
I’m a working filmmaker. My work is cinematic. In the sense that each piece has a character, a narrative, a theme, a story, but unlike with a film, you direct your own eye… In an out like a zoom lens. Left and right and right and left, like a tracking shot or pan. Up and across like a big crane move. Close up, as you like, all the way back to the wide. The viewer decoding the piece, inventing their own story.
These pieces deal with popular culture and the ephemeral nature of all things. I explore that through the use of ephemera (get the joke?) The Here and Gone. The Was. I collect the ephemera myself. Off the street, flea markets, travels, things I’ve eaten, books I’ve read, old magazines, new magazines, trying to avoid the nostalgia that is too often at the center of collage, rapid curating, grabbing something that is right now, that we have no historical relationship to YET because it’s happening this week, then seeing how that ages. How our relationship to red hot narrative changes, days, weeks, years after the fact.
I like making mistakes. I like throwing paint at my paint. Closing my eyes and trying to see how long I can go before I ruin it, then open my eyes to see where my arm went, where the brush went, the pencil, the palate knife… with the intent that no matter how many mistakes I make in a piece, I can always re-organize those mistakes into something beautiful, useful, transformative — something I can live with…
AMERICAN WALLPAPER is a theme I’ve returned to frequently with a sensibility for the street. These pieces are loud, bawdy, random, obnoxious, sophisticated, funny, color-coordinated, witty, nonsensical, random, beautiful, lush and highly structured — and intended to blur the line between ridicule and worship of the culture itself — repurposed and reimagined as billboards, travel posters, record covers, bus kiosk, religious objects, a newsstand, baseball cards and periodicals — the-here-and-gone totems of our world, the ephemera of our lives.
Opening Reception, Friday, June 7, 5:00-8:00pm
Exhibition dates: June 6-28, 2024
Gallery hours: Thurs – Fri 2-6pm, Sat – Sun 12-4 pm
This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.