Auraboros

Emerging from a year and a half hiatus from practicing collage, Indianapolis-based artist Bryn Foreman returns with a collection of revisited works, culminating in an archive of grief. This exhibition is about two people - one living, one dead, both gone. Bright colors, gradients, and reflective surfaces serve as a veneer to themes of cyclical violence, alienation, and hollow meaning stemming from the overexposed, shared language of visual media.

This exhibition marks the end of a cycle, the closing of a circuit. April 8, 2022, in Cathead Press was the opening of the artist’s second solo exhibition, FutureBitch, and was the last place the artist saw one of the subjects alive. All of the framed works contain a collage that was shown then, arranged in a much larger collage that took up the wall. Eight of the collages have been saved and put into custom frames, most of which are damaged or ill-fitting.

Other objects include decorations from a party, held days before the artist’s apartment was destroyed in a flood, dried flowers from a partner, handwritten notes navigating conflict, a target from a firing range, and a jar containing the leftover objects from a date.

Shrines, vessels, and markers of memory and the passage of time occupy most of the space in Foreman’s third, and likely final gallery exhibition. The medium of collage is one of measured destruction, and intentional regrowth. Here, trauma and loss give out under their own weight and collapse into something shallow, but mercifully contained.

Auraboros is not a statement, but merely a record of what has happened, and proof of life from the artist. Each work begs the question: Is closeness and intimacy still possible in the wake of total destruction? Each work answers, too, and so quietly, that the answer is simply “no.”