seeds, leaves, feathers, etc.

seeds, leaves, feathers, etc.

by William Frank

Exhibition Dates: Now through April 2024

Location: Post-Security, Concourse West Wall

This exhibition brings together selections from two bodies of work: Prairie Profiles and Drawn Small. These works are representative of Frank’s personal artistic practice that connects him to nature and nourishes his imagination while he concurrently works on public and private commissions.

Making these prints begins with harvesting, preparing, and curating natural objects to be printed. Through pressure and soft-ground etching, the specimen leaves its particular impression on the printing plate.

Prairie Profiles is a body of work that examines the American Prairie as a landscape poised between an inherited poetic imagination and ongoing scientific preservation and conversation. Bifocal and Poaceae are each made using specimens of native grass and seeds. Each work represents a specific aspect of the prairie; together they point to the friction between poetic and scientific ways of seeing and understanding.

Drawn Small is an ongoing, collaborative project with Frank’s wife and children in which they explore place, imagination, and memory through art. Making art functions like a kind of braille for his family, through which they feel, read, and experience the natural world and its Creator. Their subjects are the materials and experiences that shape their daily lives. Folium is a suite of prints made from leaves Frank and his family collected during a hike, Pluma pullus from their chickens’ feathers, and Radix basilicum from the roots of their garden basil. Drawn Small begins with the conviction that these daily interactions with the world and the act of making form our imagination and connect us to our home and land.