"Call from Inside the House: Christina Forrer at Parker Gallery" by Lisa Locascio Nighthawk

The feeling arrived as a sense of wanting to get away. Then I thought I was too hot, my frequent complaint, never voiced, that the sunlight in LA is too bright and loud. For over an hour I passed, back and forth, in front of the five tapestries and two drawings that comprised Christina Forrer’s self-titled show at Parker Gallery, uncomfortable in my body. The textiles were hung against a wallpaper of Forrer’s bright, disorienting drawings; everything was so colorful and busy that it could, on first glance, be mistaken for cheerful and warm, some high-art retread of the mid-aughts affection for pop illustration. But I looked closer—hard to do with Forrer’s massive work—and the nausea set in.

Eventually I left in a kind of torpor. Only after I made it to a second location, hunched over a lunch I’d delayed too long, could I then name my primary reaction to Forrer’s work: It grossed me out.

It’s not often that I see something that evokes an immediate and visceral sensation of disgust. As the parent of a toddler, I deal with plenty of excretions; as a subject under late capitalism and an American under the current administration, no shortage of aesthetics, acts, policies, and cultural drifts make me queasy. But disgust itself—its single, pure note—is unique enough of an experience to actually provoke a kind of confusion, a struggling-to-name. I wanted to look away from Forrer’s art. I experienced the sensation that there was too much of it, that I needed to remove myself from the gallery because I could not remove the art from it. As I made myself look, my queasiness began to dissolve into anxiety. Forrer’s work hammers a chord that is difficult for me, at least, to endure—the sound of a warning, of a call coming from inside the house. It’s as if she has made pictures of the drifting inner sense that something is wrong, some memory incorrect, some exit missing.

The Swiss-born, Los Angeles–based Forrer is known for her large-format textiles, prodigiously produced, featuring massive faces woven in lurid neons among bisected houses where the trappings of domesticity loom, unsettling and loud. Fairy tales are Forrer’s explicit inspiration, and they are often invoked when describing her work; so, too, is therapy. The habit of likening Forrer’s work to stories and insights from childhood dodges her oeuvre’s significant darkness and unknowability, defaulting to toothless statements that avoid the inexplicable churn of Forrer’s tapestries. “Fantastic events transform a twisting narrative,” writes independent curator Robert Cozzolino of Forrer’s work, “one that might seem grim and macabre but carries a lesson about integrity and faith.” Does it?

Read full article at momus.ca