Faculty of Art

Integrated Media

Zavia Forrest

Oasis: The Prototype

Oasis: The Prototype is the first stage of an installation piece. The work explores the relationship between femme fertility and the fertility of land. The work consists of flowers, moss, soil, rock, leaves, turf, and plaster, and creates an encapsulating garden-like surrounding, where the viewer is enticed by audio and visual cues relevant to the oasis.

“Oasis is an eerie, unsettling prototype to an ongoing exploration of the relationship between the land and the Black femme body. The work uses found floral materials as well as archival footage (both found and personal archive) to create an immersive installation that creates an ‘oasis of nature’ around the viewer and challenges the viewer to consider their identity in relation to the immediate land around them, as well as within their environment. Oasis stimulates multiple senses at once, creating a multi-faceted experience that explores our perception of the land and how it relates to our identity as well as our current being, and as a result forming new narratives within the scope of the city. Oasis also stemmed from the in-depth examination of our relationships to the land we originate from and reside on, and is intended to simulate an "oasis" that fuses ethereal land and our imagination of prosperity with the common understandings of "womanhood" and "Black womanhood" in our society. ”