The Washingtonian Service

January 3 – February 2, 2020

Neil Forrest’s works examine historical events, architectural monuments, and national identities, and use the lens of ceramic history to play out corporeal and material elements of storytelling. His installations aspire to a logos of craft, site, and knowledge.

Forrest’s The Washingtonian Service is a colosseum, a collision, and a suite of celestial objects that meet in DC. The colosseum appears as the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library and is emblematic of a golden age in a salient city. The real MLK Library, soon to be re-incarnated and re-inhabited, was a city’s search for modern identity in architectural form. Admired by an elite but perhaps unloved by many, Mies van der Rohe’s library is itself a storyline in Washington.

Forrest’s rendition of this icon as a porcelain model embodies both a fascination with miniatures and a flirtation with great centerpieces such as Napoleon’s commissioned “Egyptian Service.” If Napoleon used a porcelain miniature to glorify his expeditionary force in Egypt, The Washingtonian Service instead hosts the rare chance of a collision between a celestial object with a contested landmark, forecasting a cosmic problem as much as an existential one.

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Neil Forrest is an artist and professor at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and taught at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in Norway. He has exhibited at the Denver Art Museum, the Museum Hilversum in The Netherlands, and the Cheongju Biennale in Korea, and has received Established Artist’s grants from the Canada Council and the Norwegian Artistic Research Council.

The artist would like to thank SangDuk Yu, Marie MacInnis, Charles Freeman, Ellie Ruck, and George Cho.

This exhibition was supported by Arts Nova Scotia.