2/3 - 4/2/23: Relics

Frank Poor (Wakefield, RI)

RELICS
FEBRUARY 3 - APRIL 2

  • Opening Reception / Meet the Artist: Friday, February 3 / 5-8pm
  • Free and open to the public
  • Opening Reception coincides with Art Round Town. Additional Art Round Town on Friday, March 3. 5-8pm.

Artist Statement:
The work I make comes out of a complicated relationship with the American South. I spent my first 30 years in Georgia, and it will always be my home place, where my earliest and most important questions arose. Of course, I am not alone in my need to understand a region’s power to fascinate and confound.


As Jeremiah Sullivan wrote in a recent introduction to a new addition of William Faulkner’s Absalom Absalom:

What Southerners are or used to be: walking concatenations of stories, drawn or most often inherited from the chaos of the past, and invested here with a special, doom-laden meaning, the nostalgia that borders on nausea - the quality that most truly sets the South apart from other regions, its sheer investment in the meaning of itself.

In Absalom Absalom, Faulkner’s protagonist leaves the South to attend university in the North. In many ways, the distance allows him to see his past and its implications more clearly. He cannot, however, escape the pride and shame that he carries with him. When we leave the places we know best, we transform those places into abstractions. They can then be held at arm’s length, analyzed, and objectified. But, when we return to the scene, our new measurements are slightly off.

My work attempts to reconcile the evidence the world presents with my emotion/intellectual response to it. Put simply, I have both the thing and the idea of the thing to consider when trying to communicate at least some of what I think and feel. One strategy I have employed over the years is to combine images taken on trips home with their corresponding forms. These two ways of telling lead to a slippage in meaning and activate the spaces between memory and fact.

We should consider nostalgia with suspicion. It is a powerful motivating force, but as an operating principal it lacks rigor. We want to go home and know we can’t entirely. We want to remember and to be guided by our memories, but they are unreliable. The best we can hope for is to look carefully and make meaning from what we find. For me, Home is a good place to start looking, even if it is a place that I cannot quite find.

As Eudora Welty notes in her essay Place in Fiction:

Place absorbs our earliest notice and attention, it bestows on us our original awareness; and our critical powers spring up from the study of it and the growth of experience inside it…Sense of place gives equilibrium; extended, it is sense of direction too…but it is the sense of place going with us still that is the ball of golden thread to carry us there and back and in every sense of the word to bring us home.”


Frank Poor bio:
Born in Woodstock, GA 1962. Received a BFA from Georgia State University in 1990 and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1992.

Married to Peg Miller since 1991 with three children. Lives and works in Wakefield, RI. Recent exhibitions include FRANK POOR / RISIDUUM, University of Massachusetts – Dartmouth, New Bedford, MA, 2018 and More, Julian Opie, Frank Poor and Fred Wilson, Krakow Witkin Gallery, Boston, MA 2022.

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*Art 'Round Town is a gallery walk in Portsmouth on the first Friday of each month.

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Stay connected to the Gallery from home: view the virtual Gallery!

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Generously supported by:



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3S Artspace is supported in part by a grant from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

3S Artspace is supported by the New England Foundation for the Arts through the New England Arts Resilience Fund, part of the United States Regional Arts Resilience Fund, an initiative of the U.S. Regional Arts Organizations and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with major funding from the federal CARES Act and the American Rescue Plan from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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