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Jill Frank: Nothing Ventured // Nothing Gained
11am - 5pm
2015/2016 Working Artist Project
The 2015/2016 Working Artist Project was curated by Saisha Grayson, Assistant Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum, New York.
“I was really impressed by the complexity and variety of work shared with me by the applicants for this award and am thrilled that the three artists selected will have support over the coming year to pursue their diverse practices and share them with Atlanta audiences. Olufani’s engagement with the politics of history and memory for communities of color ranges across media with an effective poeticism. Frank’s large format photographs create a monumentality for subjects and social rituals that are infrequently depicted in art, inviting viewers to think harder about their significance and meaning. Lide’s quiet dialogue with tactile materials leads her to develop intimate installations that simultaneously evoke the domestic and the archive. I look forward to seeing what they do with this opportunity.” –Saisha Grayson
About the Exhibition:
Jill Frank: Nothing Ventured // Nothing Gained
Jill Frank’s Nothing Ventured // Nothing Gained brings together twenty-five photographs, selections from an ongoing body of work that explores American social rituals. Some photographs were made during or immediately following chaotic social activities such as parties, games, and contests; others were made while the subjects were posing for their own Instagram feed. Occupying the center of the exhibition space at MOCA GA are large, double-sided hanging portraits, part of a group of images taken the morning after a big party. In an immersive format, they depict, on opposing sides, moments captured only seconds apart. The use of repetition suggests that a single photograph isn’t capable of encapsulating the complex identities of these young subjects.
Frank’s work consistently both catalogues and subverts the archetypes and clichés associated with American youth culture: teenage sentimentality, feelings of alienation, social pressure and the struggle for status, and the vulnerability that comes with discovering and staking out one’s identity.
About the Artist:
Jill Frank was born in Atlanta GA, raised in Louisville, KY, and currently lives and works in Atlanta. She received a BA in photography in 2001 from Bard College and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. Her work has shown nationally and internationally, selected solo exhibitions include Golden Gallery, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Her work has been featured in Art Papers and reviews of her work have appeared in Art Forum, The Paris Review, and Bad at Sports.
Frank relocated from Chicago to Atlanta in 2011 to teach photography at Georgia State University. Her work deals primarily with the negotiation and indeterminacy of dominant social and cultural narratives. Frank’s current work investigates how American “rites of passage” inform cultural status symbols and identity formation.
More information on Jill Frank can be found here.