From the Site of Future Ruins
Curtis Frank
November 4 - December 2nd, 2022
Opening reception Friday, September 4th 6-9pm.
One day this will all pass away…the buildings will smile like a mouth full of rotten teeth…flowers will populate between cracks in cement….our inventions will lay in dusty piles with purposes only imagined…
Bob’s Gallery is pleased to present “From the Site of Future Ruins”, Curtis Frank’s first show with the gallery. Frank uses deceptively simple line work to explore classical motifs and the fundamentals of form.
In the most hopeful work, a flower sprouts from a poetry of body parts, at once pointing to our anthropocentric way of world-building, while also showing how with visual language we can image more harmonious relationships between the dichotomies of work-play, form- function, and human- nature.
His painting piles are playful meditations on the nature of composition made with careful attention to the tension between objects, implied depth and the limits of pictorial space within a flat plane. The artist plays with these carefully constructed "chance compositions" by breaking into the third dimension, blurring the line between painting and sculpture. This transition occurs in one corner, as a trio of framed works “cascade” down the wall to slide onto the floor. In the opposite corner a stack of symbols from the paintings pile up as 3-D blocks.
Frank’s simplified forms appropriate the pictographic style of Ikea manuals: an attemptedly universal language that creates more frustration than clarity, Frank’s works depict a tower of Babel, mid-destruction, like our ever breaking furniture. These works act as contemporary relics, simultaneously ever-fresh and drawn from antiquity.