New Work by Fran Forman
June 4 - July 17, 2016
240 Newbury Street, 3rd floor
(the corner of Newbury and Fairfield)
Boston, Massachusetts 02116
Fran Forman’s visual language is a fusion of photography and painting, merging magic realism and surrealism. While honing her incredible craftsmanship as a graphic designer, her imagination was captured by the emotive power of photography. Forman reveals life’s discrepancies between the conventional and the unknown. Her images are mythical narratives of dreams and fables, suffused with colours that transform them to a visionary plane. A latent angst seeps through unearthly calm. Recurring motifs from unknown realms break through the barriers of reality. Primordial symbols are translated into conventional awareness and incongruous juxtapositions. They are submitted to an austere sense of composition, acting as energy transformers and moulders of consciousness.
Forman’s approach is empirical, rooted in her personal experience of motherhood and selftransformation. From her late mother she inherited a trove of family photos which she uses over and over again, combining them with photographs of contemporary children or unknown children from long ago. This is her link between past and present.
Linking is essentially what Forman’s oeuvre is about. She connects the earth with the cosmos. She reaches out to an ultimate composition of all things by means of mathematical formulae which underlie the sciences, astronomy, and physics. In Star Gazer the features of a young girl are enmeshed in a nineteenth-century astronomical map. In Canyon in the Night the earth, seen from the perspective of geological rock formations of Southern Utah, is depicted in relation to a synthesis of the moon and Mars.
Forman connects the ephemeral moment between two states of mind. Human and animal, myth and reality, consciousness and the unconscious, are made manifest in motifs of children and adolescents, archetypes of hope. They exude a life-force that has something to do with magic–and everything to do with all-encompassing love. These enigmatic images are filled with a palpable longing, and manage to remain unfrightening in spite of their uneasy imagery.