Artist Statement
Rainn Forrest (they/he), is an Appalachian Goth Clown and community organizer. Rainn situates their interdisciplinary work in the ways that these identities, along with how being queer and disabled, inform and shape their existence through the late-stage capitalist culture in America. This work manifests as performance, experience, video, collage, humor, and sculpture. Rainn’s art is influenced by Marxist art theorists including Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodore Adorno. These Frankfurt school theorists believe that art’s value is couched in its ability to shape and change culture. In particular, Walter Benjamin’s short essay “Capitalism As Religion,” a treatise that compares capitalism to cult, has had a strong influence on Rainn’s art practice.
Rainn is interested in technology and the potential benefits and drawbacks it provides culture. Defining technology broadly, they consider anything created by humans to make life easier a form of technology including medications, computers, tools, etc. Rainn connects digital technology imagery to the transgender experience, and likens hormone replacement therapy to cyborgism. Through their artwork, Rainn strives to imagine the full potential of creativity without the limitation of creation motivated by profit.
A foundational aspect of Rainn’s practice involves human connection through creative collaboration. This is motivated by a desire to challenge and discourage competitiveness between artists. Rainn, along with their collaborators, strive to build alternatives to current hierarchy based societal structures. These collaborations are experience based and often center around the concept of ritual as a means to examine and question quotidian experience of daily life. Rainn is a member of Experience Cult Research Group, a paratheatrical collaboration. Paratheatre is a form of performance created by Jerzy Grotowski which is characterized by collapsing the boundary between the spectator and performer. There is no audience as the form is entirely participatory. Paratheatre strives to cultivate a cultural space in which authentic collective action emerges between participants. The goal of paratheatrical work is to create a fluid and active culture with a non hierarchical power structure, and to blur the line between art and life.
Bea Hurd has been a frequent collaborator since 2021. Both Rainn and Bea are diagnosed with ADHD and choose to not medicate, allowing it to influence the way they make work. They view aspects of ADHD such as hyperfocus and quick change of subject matter as beneficial rather than inhibitive. ADHD and queerness are tied to the glitch; they are ways of being which challenge power structures. Glitch can be compared to a mishap viewed as an “error” in the social system, which has the potential to disrupt dominant structures.
Walter Benjamin’s idea of Author As Producer as well as Brecht’s participatory theatre have influenced Rainn to invite participants into their work who typically do not consider themselves performance artists; it is important for them to connect with others through creation rather than consumption of artworks. Rainn and their collaborators fabricate experiences together that are sometimes then turned into another, somewhat separate video piece. Rainn considers the experience of the participants performing to be the central work, and then the video work is derived from that experience.
Drawing inspiration from christian tradition and pagan ritual while building upon paratheatrical principles, Rainn’s work seeks to challenge the core concepts of christian nationalism and its tie to capitalism through actions of satirical spirituality. Here, clowning acts as a powerful tool to explore queerness, failure, humor, joy, trauma, and criticism of politics. Clowning has a revolutionary potential to undermine the expectation of constant production and perfection expected by capitalism.
Many of Rainn’s works explore themes of gothicism in relation to queerness and ability. For Rainn, gothicism is a way of being, and a form of performance with campy fashion and aesthetics. Gothic literature and subculture has been an important space for Rainn to acknowledge trauma, including those inflicted systematically which is not acknowledged by mainstream society. To be traumatized is nearly inevitable if you are part of a minority group under capitalism. Gothic queerness opposes neoliberalism; it resists expectations of wholeness and progress and embraces failures. A connection is made here between gothicism and clowning, they both present an opportunity to explore failure and trauma through a lens that embraces them.