A Lush and Ferocious Wilderness

A Lush and Ferocious Wilderness is a journey through multiple levels of human consciousness. It makes contact with the fundamental, yet evasive, human longings for spiritual fulfillment, for answers to the mysteries of time and space, and for a resolution to questions of meaning and purpose. The project seeks to make visible the innermost parts of ourselves: longings and desires; dreams and nightmares; ideas and thought fragments; idealized fantasies and cold realities.

This series channels light and darkness, both literal and figurative, forming a forever-incomplete picture of the knowable and unknowable, embracing our knowledge and ignorance as we walk on this mortal coil, alone in the dark, together.

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Photographs are instigations, triggers, and subtle conjurers of emotion and incomplete harbingers of a recorded past. They are subjectively managed views of particular moments and an ill-equipped mimeograph of experience. To make a photograph is to posit a contestable theory, an expression of insight and mastery of ideas and materials vulnerable to dissection.  

Photographs are best at describing the intangible. They kettle our thoughts together and guide us down a path, only to leave us alone in our reflections. The are cleverly specific, but woefully inept in their descriptions. They are contradictory, incomplete, illusionary and at the same time piercingly shrewd. 

Forrest Simmons makes work that embraces the very nature of a medium that is both random and unflinchingly precise at the very same time. They show the bodies we touch, the pain of self-awareness, and an isolation that can’t be breached. They are delicate at times, quiet, beautiful and intimate. Some are still and contained, while others explode as if gravitationally unbound.  

Simmons’s photograph, Honey, explores the complexity that all photographs in some way contain as part of their ontology. Honey is an amalgam of time: past, future and present. It connects the viewer to a moment unfolding before us. In this photograph, the slump of honey slowly moves down and over the rim of a canted spoon. We anticipate the dollop as either sensuous pleasure or sticky messiness. It’s intimate, accessible and immediate, while at the same time funereal and forever lost in a time past.  

Forrest Simmons makes photographs that acknowledge the medium for what it is. He explores its inadequacies, its timidity, its incompleteness. He describes its ability to exaggerate, enhance and mystify. He celebrates the beauty it possesses and the prescriptions of beauty it abides by. The medium is complex and imperfect. Forrest Simmons makes photographs that are terrestrial and celestial, both familiar and extraordinary at the same time. Simmons knows that in life, nothing lays itself bare before us, we are just one galaxy in an expansive universe.  

Ben Gest 

Artist and the Associate Chair of Part-Time Programs
at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in NYC. 

ARTIST CONTACT

- Forrest Simmons -

Forrest Simmons is an artist working with photography, video, and sound. He is a faculty member at the International Center of Photography. He holds an MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago, where he was the recipient of a Graduate Fellowship as well as the John Mulvany and Bob Thall Scholarship in Photography. His most recent body of work, A Lush and Ferocious Wilderness, has been featured in exhibitions in Chicago, Houston, and Charlotte.

info@forrestsimmons.com
www.forrestsimmons.com