Forest Theater

Forest Theater is the catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition by Grear Patterson at the American Academy in Rome, curated by Peter Benson Miller. The exhibition and the catalogue are a collaboration between Depart Foundation and the American Academy in Rome. Both the exhibition and the book summon formative moments in the artist's life, a recollection of rites of passages, tapping into a collective, rather than simply a personal, consciousness. The wide format book is a collection of snapshots from the exhibition, which have a melancholy aspect and invoke personal recollections of places and events. These photographs explore the sense of nostalgia and of lost innocence in the transition from childhood to adulthood.
The exhibition consists of various media – sculptures, videos, photographs, canvases and a collection of objects from the artist's childhood – which acts as a sort of Proustian madeleines. While many works where conceived expressly for the exhibition and respond to specific spaces at the American Academy in Rome, they draw upon a piecemeal personal archive that spans many years and refers to disparate moments and events. These moments might be constructed as typical of an American childhood and the turbulent passages of adolescence, in the context in which Proustian memory and nostalgia enjoy wide currency as a cultural aesthetic.