Exhibition - "James Benjamin Franklin: Visitor"

James Benjamin Franklin has brightly reimagined the conventions of painting through a language of process and discovery. His works incorporate repurposed textiles such as blankets, towels, afghans, clothing, and bathroom mats, creating sensually-layered rafts of visual and physical texture which serve as alternative canvases. These surfaces, in turn, are painted, poured, sprinkled, or sprayed with materials which include acrylic paint, sand and glitter. Whereas traditional canvas can be precious or overbearing, Franklin’s tactile surfaces are liberating and playful. They allow open experimentation where his visual lexicon and studio methods can evolve or reinvent themselves.

Franklin’s paintings are housed in handcrafted plaster-molded frames, each one with a unique geometry. Irregular shapes complement and contain the playful chaos of the many-layered painting surfaces. His process of discovery explores how specific media become more meaningful when applied to textiles and other found surfaces. His work is experimental in the best sense of that oft-used expression: it deploys intentional, rigorous investigation while learning from each new result.

The finished pieces suggest an artist who relishes surprise at the unexpected while discovering freedom in technique. This freedom has led Franklin to refine his practice with increasing nuance in shape, edge, color, and texture, and their interactions over time. Ultimately, the artist wishes to communicate something essentially human about the making of his art – the joys of creative experimentation, as evidenced by the work itself.

“There’s an understanding of time that I appreciate,” says Franklin. “You can get a sense of how the art was made, revealing a story or history to the process – the joy, as well as the struggle. Bringing the viewer into the piece and having a shared experience about making and about life.” Creative acts are communicated and felt more urgently than an aesthetics borne of intellectual preoccupations. Within a single work of art, new meanings and additional layers are revealed over time. Franklin’s art is evergreen, relational, and continuously inspiring.

Paintings shown in Visitor feature vivid, bold colors and mark-making, resulting in finishes and atmospheres which are new to Franklin’s body of work. His edges and borders have also evolved, enabling a variety of ways of seeing the painting as an ensemble. The frames create counterpoints to prevailing visual energies which radiate from an alchemical display of pigment, texture, and surface.

The title of the show references a poetic entrance, or visitation, to otherworldly spaces. Franklin is a first-time visitor to Savannah, Georgia, where his work also fills the galleries at Laney Contemporary for the first time. Both artist and audience share an experience of visiting and being visited.

Bio:
James Benjamin Franklin received his BFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA in 1999 and his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI in 2017. Recent exhibitions include Cranbrook Museum of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI; KMAC, Louisville, KY; FRONT International, The Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH; Broadway, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, MI; Reyes | Finn, Detroit, MI; and Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City. Franklin was born in Tacoma, WA in 1972 and lives and works in Detroit, MI.

Hours:
Tuesday-Friday, 11-5pm
Saturday, 11-2pm
Free Admission