|
Untitled Document
|
Frank Poor: Shadows & SignsOctober 25 through November 29, 2007
Contemporary mixed media sculpture by Georgia native Frank Poor.
__________________________________________________
Frank Poor: Memory and Form
by Dan Powell, MFA
Teaching Associate, Department of Visual Arts
There is an air of elegiac silence that hangs over Frank Poor’s “Enon.” Inscriptions and epitaphs blanket the monumental forms covering their sides with fragments of graphic decoration and text. Names are gone, only remembered embellishments of form and type remain. Retrieved from memory and reformed in wood and paint, they appear as corporeal manifestations of times passed and passing.
Poor reaches into memories of youth and place and plucks out allusive bits and fragments. These are imprecise shards and slivers and their appeal is not just in the recalled, but also, in the forgotten. In Poor’s work we are constantly reminded of what isn’t there. Though solid and substantial, there is an air of flitting incompleteness about them. “Why Pay More” is an empty vitrine made of glass, wood and paint. Its muntins frame lights of glass, but also of bare wood and black panels with scrawling white text. Panes are missing, words are incomplete, and the cabinet itself contains no floor. It holds nothing but itself and recalls in its form and style a not so distant past.
In his “Sixth Lamp of Architecture” John Ruskin argued that architecture was a necessary condition for communal memory and that a building’s form helps to structure that memory. In “New Churches,” Poor echoes that sentiment. Encased in glass vitrines, four churches sit silently. Bare and devoid of detail, the churches are dependent on their inherent forms for their presence. They are familiar, ubiquitous icons of Southern small towns, and the enclosing windows, with their echos of the Neo-Classic, Georgian and Gothic, reinforce that familiarity.
Poor’s art pays proper respect to found and remembered form and narrative. His art pieces together structures, enclosures, windows, texts, and signs giving the preserved past a meaningful way to inform our future. In “Hood River” pieces of a fruit box make up the panes of a bow window. Its grid of glass and wood suspends fragments of past signs, forms and memories. It’s not just a memory of architecture, but a glimpse of the architecture of memory itself.
__________________________________________________
Curator's Note
by Cynthia Farnell
As residents of the rapidly changing South, I believe that all of us will find something hauntingly familiar and poignant in Frank Poor’s work. This is an art that is, in part, about the inexact process of remembering the past and the important role of vernacular architectural forms in the formation, definition, and endurance of a collective cultural identity.
Vernacular architectural forms, like the churches represented in Frank Poor’s sculptures, function as repositories of cultural meaning. Their presence in the landscape serves as an iconographic reminder of our shared histories. As a drive down any South Carolina road will attest, these potent symbols in our landscape are quickly disappearing, giving way to a pastiche of generic and less soulful structures. The disappearance of the older buildings from our landscape deprives us of a deeper, specific, and more personalized connection to the past than the new structures can provide.
Resurrected from his memory, Poor’s reconstructions revive lost forms in a contemporary context. He manages to extract the complicated essence of the past, while at the same time echo the fragmented character of our present moment.
__________________________________________________
|
|
|
Monday though Friday
