Simone Forti at
The Box

Simone Forti, Weeding: Steve and Lisa’s Garden 2 (video still) (2019). Video, 13 minutes. Image courtesy of the artist and The Box LA. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio.

Simone Forti’s recent poem, “Another Pretty Autumn,” whimsically begins: “What will I do when I get Up?” It continues, “I’ll turn out the light / The light in the kitchenette.” Like this poem, the works in Forti’s exhibition lead us into daylight after an artificially lit night. Whether the question of what to do upon rising refers to an end of the pandemic, the beginning of a new season, or an awakening beyond mortal life, Forti’s homophonously titled exhibition, An Other Pretty Autumn, has answers. Merging video, dance, language, sound, drawing, and photography across the meandering galleries of The Box’s space, Forti never ceases to “get Up”: she weeds Vermont gardens, performs repetitive gestures on her NYC rooftop, and ascends through her language in multiple poem-based works. Imagining language as a kind of movement and movement as a kind of language, Forti deploys a soft-spoken gaze across the decades-spanning bodies of work on display.

The exhibition is conceptually contained by the titular 13-page-long poem, its various parts coming together as carefully constructed stanzas that echo through the gallery (three speakers diffuse recordings of the poem being read aloud by three of the artists’ friends: Julia Holter, Carmela Hermann Dietrich, and Emily Mast). A second poem spans three large silkscreened canvases, The Skin of My Teeth (2018/2022), hangs in the main gallery. Both poems have a diaristic quality, responding to current events while remaining grounded in a more intimate daily experience: the last line on the first of these canvases reads, “The people in the cars are awake. I will soon be / asleep.”

Formally contrasting these text works are a series of sculptural pieces that punctuate the space with undeniable physicality: Plank (1961/2022), a piece of plywood leaning against a wall; Saw Horse (1961/2022), a sawhorse-like frame suspended from the ceiling; and That Block (2016), a found block of wood that sits on the ground beneath the sawhorse. The Very Big Sound (2022) comprises a bronze alloy gong and mallet, which hang from the ceiling, and Forti’s black leather jacket tossed lovingly in a nearby corner. Stand-ins for the body, the objects inhabit a generative contradiction between the daily and the timeless, and—particularly the gong—imply a resonance beyond their physical presence.

If for Forti, language is a container and a form of movement, it is also a home, an idea she riffs on in Window Shadow (2022), the only photographic work in the show: a dark image of a window at night as seen from the inside. The backlit midnight blue of the window and grid-like shapes of its frame invoke the quiet hours of a domestic space, and as I walked by, I saw my shadow reflected in it, temporarily mingling with those already at play.

Four videos tie the show’s quiet stanzas into a poetic whole. Statues (1977), one of Forti’s earliest video works, created with Anne Tardos, shows the artist performing repetitive gestures in and on top of her NYC apartment: standing in a leotard with legs hip-width apart, she propels her torso back and forth, swinging down and up again as her loose, curly hair falls across her shins—a living statue in perpetual movement. Three Weeding videos (Weeding: Simone’s Garden and Weeding: Steve and Lisa’s Garden 1 and 2, all 2019) are filmed from the perspective of a cat; crouching between blades of grass, we watch as Forti’s weathered hands reach to tug out unwanted growth. A meditative practice, Forti also sees the act of weeding as a collaboration with the earth: reaching and pulling, again and again, so that more greenery may one day grow.

Watching Forti’s movement-based videos leaves me with a similar feeling as reading her poetry, itself embodied in many voices: they are like two sides of a coin, translations into two tongues. This ebb and flow between language and movement becomes a framing mechanism that unifies decades of work, laying the groundwork for a less visible underlying thread: impermanence. Across the work, transitions between night and day—musings, ultimately, on mortality—remind us that our bodies, too, are but our temporary refuges, part of a larger transitory collaboration; a dance through another pretty autumn.

Simone Forti: An Other Pretty Autumn runs from April 16–May 21, 2022 at The Box (805 Traction Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90013).

Simone Forti, An Other Pretty Autumn (installation view) (2022). Image courtesy of the artist and The Box LA. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio.

Simone Forti, An Other Pretty Autumn (installation view) (2022). Image courtesy of the artist and The Box LA. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio.

Simone Forti, The Skin of My Teeth (2018/2022). Silkscreen on unstretched canvas, 44 x 33 inches each, edition 1 of 3. Image courtesy of the artist and The Box LA. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio.

Simone Forti, Plank (1961/2022). Plywood. Image courtesy of the artist and The Box LA. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio.

Simone Forti, Window Shadow (2022). Photograph, 43 x 37 x 1.5 inches, edition 1 of 3. Image courtesy of the artist and The Box LA. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio.

Simone Forti and Anne Tardos, Statues (video still) (1997). Video, 25 minutes. Image courtesy of the artist and The Box LA. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio.

Simone Forti, The Very Big Sound (2022). Bronze alloy gong, mallet, 24 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and The Box LA. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio.

Vanessa Holyoak is an interdisciplinary writer and artist based in Los Angeles. Her art writing focuses on installation, sculpture, and image-based practices. She holds a dual MFA in Photography & Media and Creative Writing from the California Institute of the Arts and is a PhD candidate in Comparative Media and Culture at USC. Her criticism has appeared in art-agenda, BOMB, East of Borneo, and Hyperallergic, among other publications.

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