Paul Forte
Artist's statement:
The genesis of my work can be traced to a conceptual approach to making art and an abiding concern with the symbolic and metaphorical potential of found objects and images. The work usually comes about in one of two ways: an idea might call for a certain kind of object or image, or conversely, an interesting thing might generate an idea. Either way, collage and assemblage are the primary means of realizing the work, which essentially involves transforming common things into visual poetry.
My art uses a variety of cultural artifacts as well as the occasional find from the natural world. The work brings these things to life with an economy of means that relinquishes neither depth of feeling nor conceptual complexity. Much of this art has an austere quality; employing a formal simplicity and a pared down aesthetic. Preconceived or experientially determined, the point is to maintain the essence of the idea. The challenge then is to produce imaginative art of both clarity and subtlety that might unite thought, sense, and feeling and thus renew art as an important way of engaging with each other. To this end, many of these artworks employ things that refer to the natural world in some way, albeit, with an inter-subjective and transformative aim. One important way that art might transform us involves revealing how our inner nature corresponds with the natural world. In other words, art has the power to disclose something of our psychic connections – both conscious and unconscious – with the world.
Visual metaphor is an effective way of expressing these connections, something that can reveal the depth and extent of our cognitive capabilities; relating our ability to understand intimately with sense perception and by extension, the body; that which fundamentally anchors us to the world. With luck, my work might enable greater awareness of the embodied nature of cognition and thus something essential to our humanness: further revelations of how we are in and of the world.
