Nicholas Frank
Nicholas Frank is an artist, curator and writer residing in Milwaukee. Frank's multidisciplinary art works, including painting, video, installation, photography, sound and artist books, are often presented within the framework of The Nicholas Frank Biography, a lifetime project detailing the history and historical significance of the output of the artist Nicholas Frank. Whether presented in museum-style surveys of past projects or as book pages, the “author” is unnamed, presumed by its third-person perspective to be other than Nicholas Frank. Book pages are presented singularly in frames or hand-bound, without benefit from the context given in the preceding and following pages.
Frank’s Pre-Selfies, photographs depicting people taking pictures of people, in the late moment (c. 2006-2009) just before selfies became pervasive. They are presented in unique, artist-designed frames that employ planar perspectives within each photograph. What selfies and pre-selfies share is that they are momentary removals from the flow of awareness, the program stopping to regard itself, again and again, like skips in a record, momentum resetting continually, a song taking a snapshot of itself. A companion piece, ‘Greatest Skips,’ is an LP of skips from the artist’s personal vinyl record collection, two 15-minute compositions of these …
Nicholas Frank is an artist, curator and writer residing in Milwaukee. Frank's multidisciplinary art works, including painting, video, installation, photography, sound and artist books, are often presented within the framework of The Nicholas Frank Biography, a lifetime project detailing the history and historical significance of the output of the artist Nicholas Frank. Whether presented in museum-style surveys of past projects or as book pages, the “author” is unnamed, presumed by its third-person perspective to be other than Nicholas Frank. Book pages are presented singularly in frames or hand-bound, without benefit from the context given in the preceding and following pages.
Frank’s Pre-Selfies, photographs depicting people taking pictures of people, in the late moment (c. 2006-2009) just before selfies became pervasive. They are presented in unique, artist-designed frames that employ planar perspectives within each photograph. What selfies and pre-selfies share is that they are momentary removals from the flow of awareness, the program stopping to regard itself, again and again, like skips in a record, momentum resetting continually, a song taking a snapshot of itself. A companion piece, ‘Greatest Skips,’ is an LP of skips from the artist’s personal vinyl record collection, two 15-minute compositions of these minor incidental compositions.
Frank ran the Hermetic Gallery from 1993-2001; co-founded the Milwaukee International in 2006; programmed INOVA (Institute of Visual Arts) from 2006-2011; and is currently Curator-In-Residence at the Poor Farm. Recent solo projects include NADA New York with Green Gallery and Untitled Art Fair with Nathalie Karg (both 2013), Peregrine Program and Western Exhibitions (both Chicago, 2013), and dual solo exhibitions at Lump in Raleigh, NC and the Green Gallery in Milwaukee in 2012. His independent curatorial projects have been presented nationally and internationally and he recently opened a space in Milwaukee, The Open, to be used for a multitude of other’s creative activities as well as presenting his ongoing Nicholas Frank Public Library project. He recently completed a residency program at ArtPace in San Antonio. His critical writing has been published in Possible Press, NYFA.com, Sculpture, New Art Examiner, Purple, X-tra, Artpapers as well as a catalogue essay, “David Foster Wallace: Nicholas Frank speaks with Brooke Kanther”, for the 2014 Whitney Biennial. He is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and The Green Gallery in Milwaukee.
Courtesy of Western Exhibitions