Frank Frances (B. 1983 Columbia, SC) is a Greenpoint, Brooklyn based artist, home, and still life photographer with an MFA in Art Practice from the School of Visual Arts. With work that challenges the everyday perceptions of memories and prejudice with close studies of photography’s materiality and dynamics, he is no stranger to being both voyeur and subject. For example, he embarked on a venture across the States highlighting the journey of American truckers for former duo Tribble & Mancenido. Driving and living out of an eighteen-wheeler for over a year, he created the series Hurry Up & Wait. He has shown in solo and group exhibitions domestically and internationally at Sasha Wolf Gallery, The Studio Museum of Harlem, Glasshouse, Carriage Trade and Werkstadt Graz to name a few. Reviews and features of his work have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vice, NPR, ArtInfo, Bomblog, and Bloomberg BusinessWeek among others.
In Remember the South, artist Frank Frances creates a contemporary re-imagining of colonialism through a fictional adaptation of elements used today that represent a potent past. Frances explores the frustrations of the nuanced variability of racism as well as their historical and current implications with a combination of photography and paper-cut collages. Elements of racism and stereotypes of the American South, including the use of blackface and other depictions of blackness, confederate symbolism, and crops including watermelon and cotton, are explored in meticulous assemblages, a kind of disturbing beauty that bears witness to inherited traumas that have yet to be fully realized. A visual narrative that is a nod to the systematic integration of a brutal history, Remember the South serves as an ode to the memory of a past that is still being experienced in the present.