John Folsom, Framework and View II, 2016

 

John Folsom: Framework and View

ON VIEW: November 12 – January 31, 2017

John Folsom (b. 1967) is a mixed media artist born and raised in Paducah, Kentucky. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Cinema and Photography from Southern Illinois University. His practice demonstrates the narrative potential of images through the intersection of painting and photography. Folsom’s photographic paintings have been widely exhibited for the past 20 years and can be found in many collections worldwide.

Framework and View is a new series of photographic paintings that explore the reality of the natural world as a cultural construct. Photographed near Savannah at the National Wildlife Refuge, images of salt marsh are digitally altered and combined with wet media transforming the photographic images into picturesque representations of land. The framework used here refers to a constructed grid, alluding to an idea of potential space in which all forms manifest. The landscape hangs on this grid giving rise to the notion that these pictures do not exist in reality but are a collaborative aggregate, reflecting the memory, reference, and sensibility of the viewer.