Forrest Orr transforms studio production into visual puzzles that resemble diaristic child’s play. Invoking the material and textual processes through which transgender identities are performed, Orr’s paintings, prints, sculptures, and text-based installations rearrange and decompose language into spatial configurations with competing, plastic (as in pliable) meanings. These “touch propositions” explore textuality — the experience of the human body as text and text as a systemized representation of human experience — inviting others to consciously create identities of their own making while illuminating the necessarily subjective experience of Orr’s transmasculine autobiography.

Forrest Orr (they/he) is an interdisciplinary artist and curator based in Los Angeles. Their work has been exhibited at GLASS BOX, Seattle; Specialist, Seattle; Actual Size LA, Los Angeles; studio e, Seattle; SOIL Gallery, Seattle; and WERK, Los Angeles. In 2017, Orr founded Specialist, a contemporary art gallery and project space in Seattle.