RO3 GALLERY, 2021-2023

"RO3 Gallery" stands as Stephanie Forbes' ambitious passion project, a testament to her commitment to fostering a vibrant artistic community in downtown Savannah. With a vision to celebrate and promote local and regional talent, Forbes established the gallery, curating bi-monthly exhibitions that showcased the diverse and dynamic work of emerging artists. Beyond being a venue for artistic expression, RO3 Gallery became a hub for community engagement, hosting a range of events that brought people together in celebration of creativity.

The gallery's inaugural exhibition in October 2021, titled "Infested / Infest," showcased Forbes' own compelling work, setting the tone for the eclectic and thought-provoking displays to follow. Over the course of its existence, RO3 Gallery went on to host a total of 12 successful exhibitions, providing a platform for artists to build their portfolios and connect with a broader audience.

A noteworthy conclusion to this creative endeavor was marked by the closing exhibition, "Hold the Light," featuring the works of Stephanie Forbes' father. This poignant showcase not only highlighted familial artistic legacies but also served as a symbolic gesture, illuminating the profound impact RO3 Gallery had on the local artistic landscape. Forbes' visionary initiative not only contributed to the cultural vibrancy of downtown Savannah but also left an enduring legacy as a supportive space that nurtured creativity and community.

ARTISTS FEATURED:
Stephanie Forbes
Nora Harrison
Debora Oden
Rob Forbes
Maggie Hayes
Heather Szatmary
Derek Larson
Abigail Tankersly
HSGS Partnership, Lonely Hearts Showcase

INFESTED INFEST, Stephanie Forbes, October 2021

 “The cicada has three jewels at the top of their head, ocelli, these jewels are blood red, having been said to have witnessed the depths of hell and aid the body in finding light source and coming to surface. I believe the human spirit must carry weights and evils unimaginary to transcend. These are the moments of my personal depths. And the highlights that will remain.

INFESTED / INFEST is an investigation of spirit that examines the causation factors of hypochondria as traumas manifested in adulthood. The cicada is used to express the narrative of the journey towards excavating or simply just understanding trauma and how it manifests itself beginning in childhood. 

The cicada life-cycle is used as a parallel depiction of personal experience and journey toward self. As hypochondria is highlighted, it is understood as a sense of infestation of spirit. The cicada must infest a source to overcome its enemy. And, one must allow themselves to be infested with information available to understand core existence and purpose so that we may also overcome and slowly  place together the hysteric puzzle of our lives and begin to heal. 

As a cicada molts, the human spirit molts also, in its physical vessel, consuming and navigating this life to eventually become its best, most completed self for the next. As the narrative of my life seems to ever change, it is in these stories, that I find myself trying to tell that I realize; Maybe it is not art in its physical and tangible state of being that I am endowed to and in love with, but rather, the consumption of the individual and their unique human experience lending itself to my understanding, and the feen for dialogue that inevitably presents itself after. 

We must connect with each other and allow the sovereign sacredness of the unique individual to play. To interact with this life as it sees fit, so that we may deepen an understanding for each other and what it means to be fully and authentically alive. 

There is a vast, deep individual richness to each of us that no one else has, and it is the only thing we have in common.

How revered and Divine it is to get to understand a life experience in a million different ways.”

‘Self Portrait’
Plaster, Wire, Foam, Nylon
Suspended Sculpture

SOMETIMES I MISS YOU, Nora Harrison, December 2021

SOMETIMES I MISS YOU blooms from the Artist’s time spent living in New York and explores the often transparent line between a city as physical home and city as emotional entity, forcing one into their own becoming.

Weaving in moments of love, grief, intimacy and loneliness; Harrison translates the aching for a city that she feels is no longer hers to experience, paralleled to the abundant growth that comes from moments after a dissolve of spirit into the inevitability of hardships, that accompany a young woman, sifting through heartache and the transitions of life. SOMETIMES I MISS YOU serves as a lens for the audience to experience Harrison’s past two years spent living in New York. With intimate writings, moments captured in thought, and paintings that are balanced with an eye for design and rhythm- executed with integrity and tenacity, Harrison remains respectfully intentional and transparent with her journey in love and life. The paintings feel like poetry, a direct mirror to her writings.

This exhibition challenges us to reflect on moments of growth and heartache as tokens of overcoming and resilience, building blocks to becoming an ultimately confident force in this world.

TILTING AT WINDMILLS, Debora Oden, February 2022

A solo exhibition featuring award-winning and internationally recognized Artist, Debora Oden 

TILTING AT WINDMILLS is a curated exhibition featuring a compilation of paintings and print works from the Savannah based artist’s archives, creating a generous step into the historical context of Oden’s life. 

A bit like resurfaced memory, these selected pieces work to highlight defining moments of Oden’s life as a mother, an artist and teacher. Much of these works have been created sporadically, rather than collectively, along the timeline of the artist’s life. Oden’s work acts as a dedication to the human spirit, evidently scratching at every surface and moment that compiles the definition of character, bringing the artist to her own current space and time. Each work holds a distinct journey, a chiseling of moments, welcoming the viewer into an embrace between the artist; Merged well with a distant, tragic longing; A statement that remains simultaneously mysterious yet blatantly responsive and reverberant. 

With considerable moments of repeated line in Oden’s prints and the multiple layers that have been conciously tended to and reworked in her paintings, many of these works feel like an obsessive hope to tap into the depths of life’s pivotal moments, that should be sat with- but only for a moment- taking necessary time to select and pull from them tangible strengths to gracefully move in this life

Oden’s works are high risk yet conscious cravings to excavate yet honor that which hinders the human spirit and binds us to the journey of life,  a richness that acts as sour honeysuckle to the soul; and a personal narrative of time and place.

ROB FORBES, Childish Things; Explorations of the Inner Child, April 2022

“For many years I have thought about ways that I could use this personal subject matter to illustrate and communicate the joy, imagination and love that toys bring to people of all ages. In the last ten years in particular I have been collecting items via friends, estate sales, on-line and any other source I could find that I thought would best breathe life into and communicate my vision.” -Forbes

Childish Things is an exhibition featuring a range of works including photography and sculpture by St. Simons Island, GA native and SCAD Alumni, Rob Forbes. 
Childish Things explores the limitations and repercussions of a narrow youth curated by the dark side of the foster care system in the 60s and 70s. In considering the wounds of every living being, Forbes explores his own childhood trauma within the individual and its manifestations generationally, and roots inherently. The artists calls for reflections of Innocence, and the simplicities of play for a child through the lens of an adult; One balanced in hope, that the joy one deserves to feel is actually a right and obligation, by his dynamic use of collected toys of over a 30 year search. 
By his use of photography and sculpture, Forbes researches the story line within each used toy and found object to express his own. In his Augusta studio, Forbes builds memory specific compositions that both narrate his own youth and journey into adulthood, as well as speak to our rapidly changing world, via technology as he sees the age of innocence getting younger and younger and as such, Forbes sees a future that has very few toys. A token on his skillful mastery is the component of lighting within his compositions as Forbes does not edit the photos he captures, they are printed as shot.
This work is in part a documentary of the things that brought children love and joy as well as a proclamation of a harbored youth, having lost his own innocence by forces beyond his control. At an age where most children should be playing and exploring, Forbes was forced into abusive environments within the Foster Care system that have ultimately influenced the path for his career as an artist.

‘The Half Inflated Basketball,’ I-XII

20x20” framed, matted in non-reflective glass, print on archival paper

‘Checkmate’
4x4’ft installation
Singular 4x4”in panels compiled with various toys adhered to circular panels
Interactive piece.

MAGGIE HAYES, Nowhere To Go, July 2022

”On the 5th day of a seven day silent meditation and water fast, I had hit a wall of lacking purpose in the process that I was undertaking. A spiral of minor anxieties began filling me with doubt and fixation, but having committed to the seven days, and specifically to bearing nonjudgmental witness to the processes of my mind, I continued to sit, to breathe and to drink my water. The question of “Why am I even doing this again?” brought me to consider the emotional and attitudinal differences between being stuck and being still. From external observation without context, these circumstances may appear to be the same, so the internal relationship becomes more significant…we are either resting into the experience, or in resistance to the experience. The awareness of “There’s nowhere to go” appeared and I allowed myself to gently drop the resistance to being exactly where I was with exactly what I had. 

Being stuck, we may feel limited, even imprisoned, our willpower blocked… Stillness rather, allows for a pause of movement with an attitude of neutrality. And just as we can observe when we glance up at the ever shifting clouds in the sky, the world is intrinsically full of movement, mutable, in a continuous process of refining itself. We may be able to feel a relative “stillness” in our bodies, but our heart is always beating, our cells regenerating, our electric vitality pulsing…the world in which we live is in constant flux, a spinning orb, full of infinitely active processes of emergence and decay, death and renewal. Instead of rigidly maintaining our views in defiance of new awareness, or rigidly maintaining the self concept in defiance of new understanding of ourselves, we can work to still the mind. This refinement of mind allows us to begin to see with greater clarity, learning how to meet ourselves and our surroundings again and again with fresh and clear sight. 

The cloud gestures are my meditation on that impermanence. On one hand, none of these clouds will ever be found or experienced again, and even as I drew them had often disappeared and the drawing became an amalgamation of the various cloud friends that greeted me during that time…on the other hand, each of these clouds are reconfigured in the transformations within the water cycle, becoming rain, becoming lakes, becoming clouds, becoming a cup of tea, and so in that sense, as Thich That Hanh so beautifully described, “A cloud never dies.” I also share in this experience…part of me is eternal, and part of me is constantly changing. That acceptance is a movement into non-dualistic thinking, allowing the binary to be composted. 

This frame of mind is not for the sake of spewing toxic positivity about how we should just be grateful for everything, blissed out on meditation and oneness, love and light…

To me, cultivating this neutrality is a purely athletic approach, a warrior’s approach. I don’t need to waste energy deciding what is good and bad about my circumstances, I just need to see clearly so that I can respond and play my position well. I can focus on being aware, skillful, and responsive, rather than trying to be the judge, jury, and executioner. This approach was also very much helpful in the event of my cancer diagnosis in February. I didn’t see a need to define it as good or bad, it simply *was*. Something to understand, collaborate with, and to surrender to the alchemical processes of upheaval and healing that it brought me.

This is where our creative faculties really come alive…once we can view the raw materials plainly, we can determine our choices with less of the bias of our conditioning, our past wounds, and hurt determining for us what is possible. In that way, we create anew. I am very much challenged at times in committing to this continuous arrival myself and to me this applies broadly to our lives. 

I am in no way indifferent to suffering. Grief is a cherished friend who I visit often, am inspired by, learn from, and mourn with daily if not hourly… I do not take delight in others' pain, whether it is the pain of the families whose lives were devastated by military intervention in Vietnam, or the soldiers who were devastated by that intervention… but understanding the pain, means understanding each other, which allows us to find each other again and to nurture connection and relationship… To be in communion with the heartache and loss and devastation that is present in the world, as well as allowing for all of the spectacular joy and expressiveness, allows us to see each other more clearly, as well as to see the path forward more clearly… 

That is my commitment, to try to see, to try to feel, to try to understand, and to be as  aware, skillful, and responsive as possible. In the words of Bayo Akomolafe, “to lean sensuously into the questions”. I am not here to save you or to save the world, but to be here with you in all of the grief of its horrors and all of the splendor of its beauty..so that we may lovingly tend to what needs tending.”

Hello, My Cloud, I-XXXIV
8x8, 8x10, 10x10"
Acrylic on Wood Panel

HOW MUCH IS NOT ENOUGH, Heather Szatmary, September 2022

”I count things. It’s a problem I learned from my father. I analyze my daily life, including data such as weight loss and gain, comments and likes on social media, miles ran or walked. All of these are logically quantifiable, but currently, my obsession is with relationships. How does one represent the intangible bonds between people? I’ve been capturing the rhythm of relationships by meticulously tracking text messages sent and received, and less than meticulously estimating sexual encounters. 

The data I gather drives the modeling of 3-dimensional form, but I intentionally avoid creating clearly recognizable infographics. Each new series depicts the same data in multiple ways – allowing the numbers to inform the imagery, but not control the form. The technique behind this work involves three-dimensional modeling programs to build the digital masses, that are eventually frozen, specific views are hand-drawn, and some of those drawings are re-animated for the viewer.

I do not rely on algorithms or generative programs to sculpt space. Using the data, I maneuver the geometry by manually controlling the size of each section, until I am satisfied with the result. Although my process is systematic, it is not random. There are many experiments that live on only in my computer as rejected attempts. In the work that survives, relative quantity becomes clear as scales shift and forms appear to occupy space. The entire process allows me to revisit important moments and remember the mundane. In the drawings that result, energy ebbs and flows. 

Components explode, forms shrink. People come. People go. 

Sometimes they come back.”