Fran Forman
We are so very happy to kick off our 2023 season with Fran Forman. She is an artist, educator, mentor and therapist. In 2022 she was selected in the Photo Lucida top 50 Critical Mass. Fran is an Affiliated Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, teaches workshops nationally and internationally. She’s participated in numerous exhibions including The Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock Abbey, England, The Massachusetts State House The Griffin Museum of Photography, AfterImage Gallery (Dallas), the University of North Dakota, Galeria Photo/Graphica (Mexico), Sohn Fine Art, OpenShutter (Dorango), and the Pucker Gallery (Boston) Fran’s photographic-paintings reside in the permanent collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM, Washington, DC), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Grace Museum, Abilene, The Sunnhordland Museum, Norway, the Conner Collection at The University of Texas, and the North Down Museum, Northern Ireland. A bit of a legend, we are feeling pretty spectacular to feature her works and share her extraordinary process. - Steven J. Duede, Artist
The Color of Absence
By Elin Spring , Editor, Publisher, Writer. visit: What Will You Remember 2.16.23
Fran Forman has long explored the elusive realm of our dreams, fears and internal conflicts in her surreal photographic compositions. Her newest series “The Color of Absence,” mines the strata of global and personal strains that have plagued us in recent years. Utilizing a library of her photographs made during artist residencies in enchanting and sometimes exotic environments, Forman works intuitively to craft scenarios whose allure belies a permeating sense of imbalance. She builds theatrical tension in formally designed frames that use geometric elements, space, and the separation of objects and people to convey isolation. This disquieting message is suffused in radiant, luscious hues. But her narratives also possess a classic “noir” aesthetic with their contrasty interplay of light and shadows. The combined effect seems to suspend time, accentuating the feeling that something is about to happen. While her subjects’ gestures convey expectancy and longing, hope always insinuates itself in metaphors for possibility like windows and doorways. Forman’s rich layering of visual elements crescendo in dramatic fantasies that echo our deepest emotional yearnings.
The color of absence
Over the past few years, I have noticed a sense of absence, disconnection, and disquiet permeating my life and those around me.
Creating constructed visual narratives allows me to express visually what I cannot articulate with words: How do you describe absence?
Absence comes in many conflicting forms – longing despite proximity, loneliness within the sunny illusion of domestic tranquility, shadows on a sunny day, realism with illusion.
I am a story teller. I create these constructed tableaux to grapple with and express ambiguities. Each image is a separate story, immediately personal.
My visual narratives expand on the noir tradition of exposing fragility, longing, and lost kinship. I place my subjects in uncertain settings, just out of reach of companionship. They are as elusive as a shadow or are absorbed in their interior lives. The play of light within a shadowy space - with its evocation of silence - gradually brings on a sense of existential isolation.
An empty space suggests an absence or the liminal space between this world and the next. Geometry, especially in the use of rectangles and diagonals, seem to suggest a sense of stability, refuge, and a solid foundation, but it can’t submerge one’s sense of unease.
Vibrant fantasies trap viewers in a distorted perception of time and space, eventually offering an ‘escape hatch’ by way of a lit window, a mirror, or door left ajar.
Fran’s process of creating her ‘photo-paintings’ is unusual. While her images suggest the fracturing and disconnection of relationships, her method suggests the opposite. She photographs disparate people and settings during her extensive travels over years. Back in her studio, she digitally melds and connects fragments, sometimes chosen at random, to create a story. She works like a choreographer, trying various configurations and relationships, until the pieces fit together like a completed jigsaw puzzle. The process is entirely organic and intuitive. She has found over time that despite starting with disparate pieces and settings and visually linking them together, the human emotions in her visual narratives are indeed universal.
Fran Forman
I am a story teller. I create these constructed tableaux to grapple with and express ambiguities. Each image is a separate story, immediately personal.
Fran has mounted many solo exhibitions, including The Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock Abbey, England, The Massachusetts State House (The Griffin Museum of Photography), AfterImage Gallery (Dallas), the University of North Dakota, Galeria Photo/Graphica (Mexico), Sohn Fine Art, OpenShutter (Dorango), and the Pucker Gallery (Boston), as well as numerous group shows. She has won numerous awards and prizes and has been featured in other magazines and publications.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Fran studied art and sociology as an undergraduate at Brandeis University. She then received an MSW, working as a therapist for several years with heroin addicts and their families. Returning to her passion for making art, she began making staged photographs. She earned an MFA from Boston University in graphic design, a field in which psychology melds with art. She spent most of her grad school years experimenting in the darkroom.
In the early ‘90s, Fran began incorporating photography and digital collage into her design work. She designed several visually rich CD-roms and later became an art director at AOL-Time Warner. There, she designed the preeminent web site devoted to African American culture.
Between professional life and raising her two daughters, Fran continued to create her personal art, combining her illustrative and photographic skills with a passion for paradox, illusion, assemblage, and the dislocations of time and place.
Fran is an Affiliated Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University and teaches workshops nationally and abroad. She is also a recipient of many honors and grants and has been a Resident Artist at Holsnoy Kloster, Norway, Millay Arts, The Studios of Key West, and the Vermont Studio Center.
She is represented by Pucker Gallery (Boston), Afterimage Gallery (Dallas), Susan Spiritus Gallery (Newport Beach, CA), Sohn Fine Art Gallery, and Galeria Photo/Graphica (San Miguel de Allende, Mexico). She resides in New England.
Visit Fran
Fran Forman