Opening Reception
Friday, May 1
6:00–8:00pm
DOCUMENT is pleased to present Meditation Furniture for Ten Minute Breaks, the first Chicago solo exhibition by Derek Franklin. The show includes Franklin’s recent paintings and sculptures in a site-specific installation. The exhibition opens on May 1st with a reception from 6pm to 8pm and will continue through June 13th.
While recently sleeping next to a historic cemetery I noticed that the birds sang an alarm song all night. They may have said Awake! Awake! The Ghosts are approaching. We already knew that. The Ghosts had been here for quite sometime requesting our assimilation into their being. We were tuckered out, as they say, so we thoughtlessly accepted the invitation. We loaded our minds with ideas about how one could become what we are not, in order to speak the languages of some standard. So we abscond with a harmonious squeal, from the notes of our nature until one day we hanker for revisiting our former selves. However, forever impaired our homecomings are impossibly tumultuous with our pining to touch the domestic communions we once knew has appropriately become impossible and vanished by way of vapor clouds. Vanished into vapors like the Ghosts that made the birds sing that night, leaving an illustration, an effigy of the labor embedded in our hands attempting to elicit them to transpose them into articles that are animated.
Derek Franklin, b. 1981 in St. Helens, OR lives and works in Newark, NJ. He has exhibited at Thierry Goldberg, Simone Subal, Soloway, and Rawson Projects, in New York. Franklin has also exhibited with Andel 31 Rocks Box Fine Art, PDX Contemporary, and Pulliam Gallery. He holds an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, 2012, and a BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art, 2009. Franklin is also a partner and director at the artist run space Soloway in Brooklyn, NY.
