Derek Franklin “Mending Capers”
Thierry Goldberg
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Thierry-Goldberg Gallery presents Mending Capers, the first New York solo exhibition of Derek Franklin. The show includes Franklin’s recent paintings and sculptures in a site-specific installation, where components of a fragmented personal narrative balance off one another throughout the exhibition space.
Revolving around three themes, Healing, Abandonment and Revitalization, Franklin takes the viewer through a journey of sorts. Beginning with a low steel sculpture in the center of the room by the entrance, where a round galvanized component with a drain hole hangs off a black bar and recalling a sanitary sink or a therapeutic tub.
The middle room of the gallery space contains an installation titled Charnel Ground, featuring low-rise cast concrete sculptures that sprawl from one end of the room and into the main space in the back. Some of these sculptures look like a Brutalist version of a Jean Arp shape, made in several shades of grey and in multiple textures. The title makes a reference to a Tibetan funerary practice in which the bodies of the dead are left on a mountaintop to naturally decompose.
Another sculpture titled T’s Izba (Tatlin’s Oven in Russian) stands in the main room of the gallery space, where a large steel structure holds a half-round compartment that resembles an oven. A few jars of gin-soaked golden raisins are placed inside, a homemade remedy for joint pain. Also in the main room are four paintings from Franklin’s Rocky Series, a group of process-based works where he scans parts of Norman Rockwell paintings and prints them over a surface that looks like a wall that needs to be painted.
Derek Franklin, b. 1981 in St. Helens, OR, lives and works in Newark, NJ. He has exhibited at Simone Subal, Soloway, and Rawson Projects, all in New York. He holds an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, 2012, and a BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art, 2009.
Media
Schedule
from January 08, 2015 to February 22, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-01-08 from 18:00 to 20:00