Noir Portals and The time of Corona by Fran Forman

"My most recent images were created during the anxiety and isolation period of Covid-19, which I am calling ‘In the Time of the Corona’. They expand on the noir tradition of looking at what lies beneath the illusory, sunny narrative of American life and 'domestic tranquility’.

The figures in my visual narratives, often solitary, express the isolation, longing, entrapment, and disconnection endemic in our current lives. Nevertheless, a slash of light through a portal can offer a measure of hope."

“I love making pictures. All my life, it has been my hobby, my obsession, my means of procrastination, my torment, and my salvation. I create images because I love to look at images. Now I take photographs, combine and manipulate, paint and alter, fuse photographs with painting, reality with fiction – whatever it takes to tell a story.

For me, the click of the shutter is just the beginning of the process, because it’s the manipulation of the still image that I most enjoy. (First in the darkroom, and since the late 80s, on the computer.) This is where my ‘inner painter’ comes to play.”

“What do I get out of creating photographs? It’s just that: manipulating reality to create a new world, a different visual narrative that, by juxtaposing realism with illusion, could defy the laws of physics, truth with illusion. Creating new images out of fragments of photographs is a little like being a master puppeteer, I suppose, or maybe a stage designer. And recreating an image to suggest that it just might be real - until a closer look - that is the challenge and the delight.”

Books

The Rest Between Two Notes: Selected Works by Fran Forman (Unicorn 2020)

Escape Artist: The Art of Fran Forman (Schiffer 2014)

 

Monographs

Self-Illumination: New Work by Fran Forman (Pucker Gallery 2020)

Visual Narration (Pucker Gallery 2018)

Merging the Known and the Unknown (Pucker Gallery 2016)

Enchanted Constructions (Pucker Gallery 2014)

 

Publications (selected)

Beta Development in Photography

Shadow and Light Magazine

All About Photo

Catalyst Interviews

Sony Alpha Universe

Kolaj Magazine

Blur Magazine

 

Museum Collections

Boston Museum of Fine Arts

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC (2013)

Western Carolina University Museum, North Carolina

Sunnhordland Museum, Stord, Norway (2017)

University of North Dakota (2018),Grand Forks, North Dakota

The Grace Museum

Alice and Bill Wright Photography Collection, Abilene, Texas (2014)

North Down Museum,Bangor, Northern Ireland (2015)

Comer Collection of Photography, University of Texas,Dallas, Texas (2015)

 

Exhibitions (Selected)

Solo

Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock Abbey, National Trust, UK

AfterImage Gallery, Dallas, Texas

Massachusetts State House, The Griffin Museum, Boston, MA

The Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA

Photo/Graphica Gallery, Mexico

University of North Dakota

Garner Center Gallery, Boston

Tao Water Gallery, Provincetown

OpenShutter Gallery, Colorado

Sohn Fine Art Gallery, MA

 

Group

Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC

Cape Cod Museum of Art, Dennis, MA

Halsnoy Kloster, Sunnhordland Museum, Norway

Rowan University Gallery

Attleboro Museum, MA

Municipal Heritage Museum, Spain

Dimbola Museum&Gallery, UK

 

Residencies/ Fellowships

Halsnøy Kloster, Norway

The Millay Colony for the Arts, New York

Studios of Key West, Florida

Vermont Studio Center

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