Johnny Forever Nawracaj is a nonbinary Polish-born multidisciplinary artist working primarily in performance and video. Coming from the social realist settlement district of Nowa Huta, Poland they were a childhood immigrant to Tkaronto/Toronto. Nawracaj developed their current practice while the based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal where they received an MA in Art History from Concordia University. Forged on DIY queer cabaret stages, their work weaves surrealist narrative through video, installation, and femme-inflected performance to explore labour and loss. Nawracaj is particularly invested in exploring these themes in relation to queer and nonbinary cultural production.

Forever has shown work internationally, most recently performing in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics’ 11th Encuentro in Mexico City as well as in Los Angeles at Human Resources. They are currently building an ongoing collaborative media work with sound artist Gambeltron, the first iteration of which was shown this past March at Meinblau Projektraum in Berlin. In May 2020, Nawracaj graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree from USC Roski School of Art and Design as an International Artist Fellow.

Johnny Forever’ Subcontractor collages tease out the embodied erotics of construction materials. Orchestrating objects such as boards and wigs, Forever exaggerates the absence of bodies with space and color in their collages.

They underline the use value and necessity of these objects: Wigs are to be worn; boards are to build homes. Forever isolates the enshrined wigs and piles on boards to create holes. Alone they appear to be pensive, the wigs are angled away from the viewer deepening the feeling of estrangement from the familiar silhouette of a wig. It is an estrangement to these familiar materials originating from Forever’s time as construction worker and cabaret performer in Montreal. They consider their collages to be blueprints for future performances. – Hugo Cervantes

Hugo Cervantes is a writer and curator living in Los Angeles. They are Assistant Curator at Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) and are a part of Human Resources-Los Angeles.