RYAN FOERSTER

Coinciding with the first anniversary of the pandemic lockdown, VIDEO CLUB #4: RYAN FOERSTER is an homage to New York City. The presentation brings together three of Foerster's videos completed between 2014 and 2020, each set to the Big Apple: AMERICAN TRILOGY (2014), COME FOR TO CARRY ME HOME (2014-2019), and QUARANTINE RUN (2020). They depict city life as it unfolds before someone who is paying attention to the unusual scenes unfolding right in front of them––but with some embellishment. Shot in New York City and Brighton Beach, where he lives, Foerster creates these videos using his personal iPhone videos, photos, and audio recordings. They deal with daily life and show friends, strangers, and the artistic community. Although documentary in nature, Foerster's videos become unclassifiable with the introduction of interactive animations, found audio, the Ken Burns effect, and lo-fi movie editing apps. For Foerster, this sense of collage is an extension of his broader practice and reflective of his diaristic sensibility applied across the mediums of sculpture, photography, and publishing. 

Videos like AMERICAN TRILOGY (2014) and COME FOR TO CARRY ME HOME (2014-2019) could both be described as "movie journals," to borrow a term from Jonas Mekas. Both are compositions of thoughts, images, and scenes. Their nonlinear, free-form construction feels like channel-surfing streams of consciousness––reminiscent of avant-garde filmmaker Chris Marker, who dealt with memory as that which is innately imperfect. Through a range of unorthodox DIY audiovisual effects, irregular pacing, and nonlinear organization, Foerster pushes the boundaries of reality (and memory) into the fictional space of caricature. As scenes seem to cut from one channel to the next, sincerity and parody become effects unto themselves. QUARANTINE RUN (2020), the most recent and most narrative of the three, is a study of time and anxiety amidst a global pandemic. Stretching a routine activity out into its literal duration, we watch for seven minutes as the camera captures Foerster's mile run down the Brighton Beach boardwalk. A sudden unexpected transition––evocative of Hollywood monster films like "Cloverfield"––gives horrifying form to an otherwise invisible virus plaguing the city. As it happens, truth is often stranger than fiction. Throughout his representations of reality, viewers experience varying degrees of life in a mad-hatter metropolis. Genre-bending and experimental, but no less mesmerizing, Foerster seeks to transform the medium into a unique expression of lived reality.

—– Lola Kramer

Ryan Foerster (born 1983 in Newmarket, Canada) lives and works in New York, USA.

Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at The National Exemplar, Swiss Institute, White Columns, Martos Gallery, and Kerry Schuss, New York; Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York; C L E A R I N G New York / Brussels; Ribordy Thetaz, Geneva; and Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles.

His work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including The Museum of Fine Arts, Split; Columbus Museum of Art; Aspen Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto; VNH Gallery, Paris; and Galerie Patrick Seguin, Paris.

Foerster currently has a solo presentation at the National Exemplar, Iowa.