Spotlight on...Brett Foreman A snapshot of a spring semester at art school

Author: Alexxa Gotthardt

Brett Foreman '07 is an Environmental Science major with a focus in fine art. Last spring, hoping to explore more fully his passion for photography, Foreman enrolled in University College London's Slade School of Fine Art. Manned with a studio all his own, a non-stop stream of candid critiques, a passionate group of peers and a vibrant backdrop that doubled as one of the world's boldest artistic hubs, Foreman pushed his own creative bounds, building a new, innovative and provocative body of work. Now back at Middlebury, Foreman gives The Campus a glimpse into "Private View," his collection of large-scale black and white photographs that explore such challenging themes as technology, pornography, popular culture and self-exposure. Here, Foreman talks about his experience at Slade and the work he made there. Watch out for Foreman's upcoming on-campus exhibition of "Private View," for which he received a Wonnagrant, a funding program provided by Wonnacott Commons designed to support student initiatives.


The Middlebury Campus: Why did you decide to take a semester at Slade, a school specific to the arts?

Brett Foreman: The general idea of it was that I wanted to go somewhere that was applicable to my major. I could have done something either ES or art oriented. Middlebury has a great ES program, but the art department is, well, underprivileged. There's not a huge array of opportunity and there are only about four faculty members at any given time who teach classes. Also, maybe the biggest issue is that only a few of your peers in the art classes are really interested in art - interested in spending time at museums, spending time looking at art and understanding it intellectually and creatively. There are a lot of people who just want to make pretty pictures. At an art school, people are serious about art and the school is serious about art.

I also wanted to have the opportunity to just focus on art. That semester might have been the one time in my life when I was able to exclusively make art instead of having to go to three other classes and then go to my art class. At Slade, there is no art class. You go, and you make art. You have a studio space and you put up your work in progress and peers look at it, teachers look at it. You have one-on-one meetings with professors and you constantly talk with the students who are seeing your work - there is so much interaction. There are also formal critique seminars, critiques with random artists and people within the various tutorial groups who are looking at your work and giving input.

TC: How did you deal with the constant critiques? How were the responses to your work?

BF: Mine was strangely well received. Some people's were really hacked up. In the critiques, it's really important to be able to say why you did what you did. Feeling is important, but you also need to talk about your work concretely. They might ask you "What's the point of this thing you made?" They're pretty direct about it and if there is something they don't like, they'll say it. My personal tutor, this woman named Phyllida Barlow - she's like old mamma Slade - has been there about 30 years and was amazing. I sat down with her at our first tutorial and she - a sculptor - said, "I'll tell you what, I just inherently do not like photography." That didn't really discourage me though - it was kind of a challenge. I thought, "How can I show her something she will appreciate, something that will make her think?" If I was just showing her nice, easy landscapes or cityscapes I think she would be a lot less interested. You have to go deeper. Every shoot I did changed a little bit, at every shoot I added new elements.

TC: Through this concentrated atmosphere, how do you feel your work changed or improved?

BF: One of the most significant things about being at Slade is that I had so much freedom. For one, there's no such thing as class and there's no such thing as an assignment. No one ever says "do a portrait assignment" or "do an homage assignment." You are expected to know, for your medium, what tools are available to you and how to accomplish the effect you want. You're expected to come up with something that you want [to create] and come up with something good. So, in that way, the experience was so self-directed - it really pertained a lot to being a real-world artist, not that I'm necessarily going to be one. For me, it's a whole lot better training than being told what to make. It already limits so much what you could do, what you could be conveying. The independence was really important - going to the [art] shows, going to the libraries, researching something that I found interesting and then making art that pertains to that, responds to that, says something about that.

TC: In what medium do you primarily work? Do you have a primary subject?

BF: I primarily work in black and white photography. I don't really have a primary subject. I've been working on portraiture quite a lot, as you can see here. [He lays out some of his most recent work]. But portraiture is just where this project went - mostly self-portraiture, which is where I am continuing to figure things out [also on the wall of his studio hangs a series of black and white self-portraits photographed in his senior year of high school]. This sort of shoot continues into the more perverse realm of [getting it on] with computers. [He lays out his portfolio entitled "Private View," pointing to one photograph that depicts Foreman, in the nude, in a kind of sexual interaction with a computer].

TC: Yes, there's definitely a sexual element to this series. What were your specific inspirations/influences throughout this rather risqué body of work?

BF: Yep, there are a lot of sexual elements. I was working a lot in self-portraiture and I was thinking a lot about sexuality. Pornography was kind of a big thing for me.

I've also been kind of interested in creamees - ice cream - because they're so wholesome, yet so easily perverted. I've always wanted to take this picture of Emily [Emily Lee '07 who also spent last spring at Slade] shoving a creamee into her eye and letting the ice cream ooze down her face. We were in the studio and she did it, so I thought, well, I might as well do that too [next to the photograph of Emily, is a close-up self-portrait of Foreman - following suit, ice cream covers his hair and trickles over his face]. Because really, even though it's a portrait of her, it's also a portrait of me. Then, I started to think about the fact that probably the most commonly viewed type of image on the internet is porn. Internet porn is huge. Everyone's searching for internet porn. Hey, I search for internet porn. It's something very big that's happening in technology.

This "Private View" series has to do with me, with porn, with popular culture and with our intriguing relationship with technology - the fact that we can spend so much time sitting at our computers. We're constantly with our technology. Like my phone [grabs his pocket], it's constantly with me. So you're sitting, and you have this intense relationship with the computer - you're spending so much time with it, you're touching it all the time - so hey, maybe [the relationship] would get sexual. That's kind of a stretch, but it's interesting. So I do go into a little bit of kitsch and definitely go into humor.

TC: And you portray yourself in the nude. Was this easy for you?

BF: Another issue for me [with "Private View"], was what I wanted to tell people about myself, what I revealed about myself. This shoot had to do with whether I could portray myself as a nude or naked [he points to a series of four standing nude self-portraits - his only accessories cables, wires, a computer, a keyboard]. This [piece] right here is like the s-curve classical discus pose. That is nude. That is naked [he indicates a piece in which his shoulders slouch ashamedly as he looks at the viewer, awar
e of his stripped appearance - a sharp contrast to the bold, Adonis of a nude Foreman pointed out seconds earlier].

There's vulnerability and humiliation and I wasn't sure if I was really comfortable showing people this type of thing. It started off like, well, I'll try this for myself and see what I can see from it. Then, I was like, well, I have these negatives, I might as well make pictures. I have these pictures, I might as well show a friend. I showed a friend, well I might as well show a professor. I showed a professor, I might as well just go hang them up. I'm not going to sit around and hide them. I mean, I made them. It was surprisingly easy for me to show myself naked. That's not really how I thought I was going to feel. I thought I'd be embarrassed. And a lot of people said "Oh, well it's just because you're here only for a couple of months and you can go crazy. What's it going to be like at your home institution?" Well, that is a good question. I haven't shown them yet, but I'm planning on it. And I'm showing them to you now. People are interested, they want to see what Emily and I were doing for so long over there.