krista franklin
Artist Statement
I call my collages “paper gumbo,” because I construct them from various kinds of paper – candy wrappers, handmade sheets created by friends, magazine fragments, pages of old books, scraps of frozen food packages, plastic products, and the occasional dried flower. In my aesthetic, nothing is trash. All of it can be used, and manipulated into something that can potentially become beautiful.
As a teenager, I was visually seduced by the work of the contemporary artists Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Romare Bearden. Pop culture junkie that I am, and member of the first generation of MTV youth, I was always transfixed by the ways in which these artists feasted from American culture to create work which assimilated, stimulated, and interrogated its spectators.
The primary focus of my work revolves around a series of vintage African-American photographs, some family photos, and some that I stumbled on at a thrift store in my hometown of Dayton, OH. I have named the pieces constructed around these photographs “The Recovered Ancestors” series. The aim of the series is the reclamation of these often nameless, always striking images of abandoned black folk in unidentified time periods.
My experimentations with collage are based on my attempts to create balance and symmetry from very random, sometimes disparate images, colors, paper sources and found fragments. It is also an honoring process in which I seek to affirm the lives of the ancestors.
Poet, visual artist and educator who hails from Dayton, OH, and currently works and resides in Chicago, IL. Her poems and visual art have appeared in/on several literary journals and websites, including Nexus Literary and Art Journal, Warpland, Obsidian III, nocturnes 2: (re)view of the literary arts, www.semantikon.com, www.milkmag.org, www.ambulant.org, and www.errataandcontradiction.org. She has also been published in the anthologies The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order and Bum Rush The Page: a def poetry jam. She is a Cave Canem Alum, and was a featured poet in the 2000 New Voices New Worlds Series in St. Louis, MO.
"los ojos de chango" (detail)
"man walking"
"nuclear dreams"
