Todd R. Forsgren

Phase Faze - 2001/2021

My first profound encounter with Japanese art and culture occurred in a greenhouse at the local high school. I was the youngest student, at 13, in an adult education class about training bonsai trees that was led by our colorful school bus driver, Ray Biltz. Around the same time, I started doing yardwork for our neighbor, Dick Schaefer; advanced brain cancer prevented him from caring for his extensive Japanese garden. These two eccentric white guys were both obsessed, and that obsession rubbed off on me.

So, the ideas for this project began with those early encounters with Japanese aesthetics. The project is about ritual, change, repetition, mentorship, love, death, inversions, opposites, architecture, sculpture, photography, categorization, and some other stuff too. But not necessarily in that order. It considers how and why both art and tragedy can bring about important changes in cultures and individuals.

This website has a selection of writing and diagrams from a self-published artist book that includes a complete instruction manual for a model teahouse (or actual teahouse, depending on what scale you choose to build it). I initially designed the teahouse in 2001 in the wake of the 9/11 attack while taking a class titled Japanese Architecture at my college. I rebuilt the second from memory 20-years later during the coronavirus pandemic, which is also when I began writing this poetic instruction manual.