NEW YORK, NY.- Derek Franklin’s The Shadows That Haunt the Rooms Behind Our Eyes addresses a climate of antinomy and acquiescence. Franklin’s paintings, sculptures, and site specific installations present a conversation about the performance of images, and how what is presented to the outside may be a concealment, perhaps even unknowingly, of inner resistance. This interplay takes place at the intersection of sculpture, image-making, and theater, and is elaborated with objects encountered inside domestic spaces such as coatracks and flowers. A loop of repair is intentionally placed within the works for the viewer to contemplate relationships to vital needs.

Using the proscenium, which is an ancient theatre model traditionally separating performers from audience, the artist presents a chance to reconsider the images seen every day, which feed into our expectations of having or being able to build a life as well as maintain our fantasies of the good life. Franklin makes space to question who are the director, actors, stage hands and audience creating the images and objects of the episode, the aside, the travelog, or the interruption to the online scroll. In this exhibition, the work is presented as a kind of slapstick maladjustment to this situation of experience. The stage bestows space for the body to slow down to clarify what is really going down, and this illuminates our relationship to living on in the continuous crises and loss that define the now.

Askewed coat rack forms create a static theatre set in the gallery. Made of glass, they bear a questionable utilitarian longevity from having been repeatedly overloaded with the weight of being used. They stand as metaphorical attendants to the parking lot of lives that are consistently overflowing with mundane tasks of survival. Unfortunately, as the resources needed to stay vertical grow more burdensome to obtain, in direct relation to their increasing scarcity, our bodies become like an overfilled coat rack. Late capitalism then throws us aside for a more useful and fresh model. The objects are a reminder that the current state of society is unsustainably depleting its own livelihood.

The backdrop to these are oil paintings that Franklin fabricated from pages sourced in archeological journals that were illustrated with ancient domestic objects. Franklin removes the images, and the fissures or cutouts reveal the paintings breaking the fourth wall in the most literalized Brechtian sense. Newly painted images of contemporary meals, domestic spaces and objects breach through the slits and gaps in the curtain, presenting a plane where the ancient and the now coexist together. The image relationship is then further fussed and divorced by a series of shadow glazes, highlights and abstract interventions creating a spectral painting expanse.

Within the picture plane, images of fish, dashboards, the vase cast in shadow in the corner of a room, and the antique or ancient in a home serve as both witness and hard drive. It is easy to forget that the objects around us will teach future peoples about us. When we center ourselves in that knowledge, it feels like a dog watching us have sex with a lover who is terrible for us. The objects in Franklin’s depictions watch, record, and transfer the best and worst of us at a cool distance.

From the situatedness of the proscenium, instead of the stagehands or performers’ labor holding the audience captive to the illusion being exposed, paintings of everyday rituals creating intimacy and care through acts like sharing food with others, growing flowers, or taking temporary shelter in a car are exposed and placed next to ancient objects. Revealing that our ancestors used to do the same, connecting the past to the present and speculative future, Franklin remits the audience to realize that humans have not changed very much. This collapse of time confirms that our basic tenets have remained: food, shelter, water, and sleep.

The apertures of a spotlight, or the framing of a vase or a plate, puncture the figure ground of the painting and perforate the transaction with the viewer — making them physically adjust in that indeterminate relation between the feeling of misrecognition and recognition. A continued slow questioning of who is the representative for what we see, who is being represented, and what does that representation mean seems ubiquitous. The act places us in the present just like the images presented. Within durational looking the tendency for our recognition often being the misrepresentation we can bear to see comes into question.

A circuit of repair presents itself two fold here, first placing us in the now which is the only site for encounter with happiness and joy. The second slowing down of contemporary flaneurism where aimless consumption of media and culture with an emotional detachment is anything but undirected in the age of algorithms, AI, and over-saturation for people living in a broken world.