Channels: Brooke Frank
On View: November 26th - January 23rd
Opening in our gallery for November's Artwalk is an exhibition of flat works by Brooke Frank. The exhibition, Channels, responds to wanderlust and the simplified, CMYK and RGB images with which we attempt to pacify ourselves. Each work contains or responds to pages from National Geographic magazines. Frank dissolves and manipulates the existing ink, abstracting the photographs. She then layers them, draws, writes, and paints on top of them, transforming handsomely cropped landscapes into tactile, emotional spaces, and juxtaposing the physicality of the present with the arbitrary details - the leaves, the sunsets, the exciting captions - which describe the places we wish we could escape to. The paintings, prints, and drawings imagine the qualities we crave when we dream of elsewhere, and the roles that different kinds of image-making occupy in service of that desire.
Brooke Frank is also the pilot-artist for our invitational one-week artist residency. She used this opportunity to experiment with producing a four-color monotype. Rather than sublimating a CMYK image in rich, crudely applied pigment, “Never Homesick” uses the same dense mark making in pursuit of the thin flatness of the commercially printed image. It will only be on view at IS Projects before moving to its new home in a private collection.