Dream Space: The story that hasn't happened

Brittany A. Forrest

Jul 2024 · Brittany Forrest

About this ebook

Titled Dream Space, this book examines where fantasy and reality meet in the context of a non-monogamous relationship. Side A, written on the left side, speaks to fantasy, and Side B, written on the right side, represents reality. The labeled sides on the cassette tape have been removed, to speak to the indistinguishable behavior of fantasy and reality. The focal perception shifts through the anti-narrative to speak from the perspective of the sensory, room, object, body, emotions, absurdity, and abject. In the spirit of the project's theme of spatiality, I play with different meanings of the word space and spatially animate the text to embellish specific moments. This work contemplates What space does a dream occupy? How does someone unlearn monogamy? and the advantages and challenges of a non-monogamous relationship, including its relationship with ethics.

About the author

Brittany/Andrew Forrest (she/her or he/him) is a queer Ontario-based surrealist artist and author. She focuses on character development through drawing, sculpting, mold-making, and wording that stretches away from traditional approaches to represent the tale of her estranged identity. Her study of the body began as a young child through performing arts. Rigorous observational skills transitioned into a thriving art and writing practice penetrating all facets of the being. Forrest now focuses on dissecting human exchange and perception to find correlations within the interplay between bodies by accessing memories, dreams, the imagination, and layers of consciousness. The material selection employs various studies that engage in theoretics linked to her practice that anatomizes the intricacies of psychological defense mechanisms. She does this by researching the functions, associations, and interactions between materials – essentially psychoanalyzing the medium – to propose the body as animate and inanimate.

Forrest graduated with honors from McMaster University, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts, minoring in Art History. There, she was awarded four academic scholarships, voted class choice, and earned the faculty award. During her subsequent Master of Fine Arts candidacy at Western University, she was accorded the Graduate Thesis Research Award and Graduate Travel and Research Grant. She will continue her graduate research at Western in the PhD Art and Visual Culture program beginning in the Fall, 2024. Her work was recently selected for the International Art Fair Mixing Identities (London, UK and Rome, IT), the New Realism/Altered Reality exhibition (New York City, NY), and was published in the ARTSIN SQUARE magazine. Forrest published her first autobiographical book, The Imaginary Imagination; a science fiction short story, Chair, in the art collective book titled Dystopia: A Visual Anthology; and curated her solo exhibition, gasp, at Satellite Project Space (London, ON) in 2023. A prolific author, Forrest also completed short story The Room, and books Dream Space and Velvet Ear in 2024. Lullaby is her MFA thesis exhibition.