Ryan Foerster (born 1983) is a Canadian visual artist recognized for his ‘zines, photographs, videos, and sculptural installations which frequently incorporate found objects, salvaged materials, and natural elements.
[1] The artist’s reuse of discarded materials to create new artworks is a generative process of discovery and transformation integral to Foerster’s practice as well as a reaction to excessive waste.
[10] Using the copy machine at his father’s office, Foerster and his friends printed Dear Henry Wang, a ‘zine composed of “random writing, stuff [they] found in dumpsters, photos, jokes, and interviews with punk bands from around Toronto.”[3] Issues were available in Toronto's cooperative-run store Who's Emma?
It’s funny that I’m basically doing the same thing ten years later.”[3] In 2008 Foerster presented his photographs and sculpture in a solo exhibition at Swiss institute, New York, for which he also printed a ‘zine.
[13] Foerster’s early photographs from this period are largely diaristic: observations from daily life, natural phenomena, and photos of his friends and travels.
[14] His images were featured in VICE magazine and on the artist Tim Barber’s website tinyvices, an online showcase for emerging photographers, as well as in an exhibition at White Columns, New York in 2007.
[15][16][17] Between 2004-06 Foerster, along with others, graffitied the name ‘Val Kilmer’ and pasted a black-and-white image of the actor's head on buildings, doorways, and other locations in the streets of Toronto and New York.
[20] The artist Allen Frame suggested Foerster get a membership at the Camera Club of New York, the historic co-operative dark room whose past members include Alfred Stieglitz, Richard Avedon, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, and Berenice Abbott.
And the condensation underneath it lifted up the emulsion and made it corrode.” Inspired by this chance accident, Foerster began “to experiment with photosensitive paper, exposing it to the elements—rain, heat, bird shit—weighting the paper with rocks and earth to hold it in place, which then became an encrusted layer over the image.”[2] These photograms revealed the uncontrollable influence of nature on his materials, and were an inflection point in the artist's process moving him away from his earlier style of image-making further toward a non-purist approach to the medium.
It’s just one way of looking at it.”[21] During the 2009 financial crisis, when Foerster's day job assisting artists was tenuous and he had limited resources but more time, he would walk around his neighborhood observing and collecting.
[39][40] In 2011 Foerster curated the exhibition “Harvest Moon” featuring works by his artist friends including Elaine Cameron-Weir, Erik Lindman, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, Jacob Kassay and others.