Frank Poor

“…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 …”

– Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction”

On a regular basis, Frank Poor returns to his native Southeast (USA) to photograph architecture and landscapes. With no specific itinerary, these visits are a way for the artist to reconnect with the visual language of his upbringing. The resulting images become an archive available as he creates work back in his Rhode Island studio. Often, Poor prints the photographs on films or thin papers, which become the surfaces of skillfully crafted three-dimensional architectural wood and glass objects. The images of windows, doors, sections of and whole buildings merge with their three-dimensional models and thus present two disparate ways of telling; one through image and one through form. That contradiction mirrors the slippage between memories and facts about a place and is central to Poor’s explorations.

The current exhibition presents eight works in a variety of media that range from over life-size to scale miniatures, with distortions being sometimes obvious and other times subtle. A medium-scale “barn-like” structure commands the space, a small pine model of a home is cantilevered out from a wall of the gallery, and two sets of “windows” anchor the show. These windows are in fact transparent images of windows that have been adhered to glass mounted into structures resembling window casings that Poor has built himself to the exacting proportions desired for the sculptures. Images reflected in photographed windows, objects seen through the photographed windows, and the shadows of said images, along with the actual wall behind the sculptural windows, all unify to create the experience Poor envisions.

Complementing these sculptural works, Poor presents for the first time a series of photogravures. Having first explored printmaking in college, then reengaged with the medium 25 years later, the artist has spent the past fifteen years honing his process. The trio of photogravures on view, like the three-dimensional works, seem familiar, are familiar, and yet are also constructed and/or distorted. Images of magnolia branches and blossoms, taken on a trip ‘back home,’ are digitally projected onto staged window curtains. Poor then photographs these scenarios, exposes the images to plates, and finally prints the images as etchings. Layering, manipulating, celebrating, and questioning are all part of the process for all of the artist’s works.

Poor lives and works in Rhode Island. He has taught at various institutions since he earned his MFA from RISD in 1992. Recent solo exhibitions of his works have been at 3-S Artspace, Portsmouth, NH; University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, New Bedford, MA; Anna Maria College, Worcester, MA; Grimshaw – Gudewicz Art Gallery, Bristol Community College, Bristol, RI; 701 Center for Contemporary Art, Columbia, SC; Van Every Smith Galleries, Davidson College, Davidson, NC; Artspace, Raleigh, NC; Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI, ;Welch Galleries, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT;Bryan Art Gallery, Coastal Carolina University, Conway, SC; Hamilton Gallery, Salve Regina University, Newport, RI; Callanwolde Fine Arts Center, Atlanta, GA; and the CNN Center Gallery, Atlanta, GA. He has won merit fellowships from the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts numerous times.

“Memory exists somewhere between artifact and invention.”

– Frank Poor