Britni Franklin is GlogauAIR resident
from October, 2016 to December, 2016
United States
Meet the Artist
Coming soon
Statement
My work addresses the implications of cultural appropriation in relationship to the effect of colonialism on individualized culture. I explore issue of a reverse appropriation within the context of contemporary society. I begin to express these concepts through material application and within the process itself. I assign traits of a non specific indigenous culture to portraits of individuals from the 1900s to mimic the process of taking a valuable aspect of a subservient culture and re-appropriating it within a dominate culture without consideration of its origin or meaning.
The images are created from contact prints that were made using found glass plate negatives. In order to make the prints appear to more authentic to the time period, I applied the attributes of the individualized culture through the process of hand drawing them on acetate and then laying them on top of the negative to show how things potentially could have appeared if reverse appropriation had occurred much earlier in history. For this same reason I chose to render the images in the form of oil paintings.
To address the concept within the context of contemporary society I incorporate the use of technology to create distorted renderings from the original photographic prints. The distorted images speak of the way aspects of the individualized culture are lost between the distance of time from actual existence, subversion, and re appropriation. I create the distorted images from taking a photograph of the photographic print using a cell phone camera and then I print them on untreated acetate sheets using an inkjet printer. While the ink is still wet I spray them with fixative to make the images look like they are disintegrating. Through each step taken to reach the distorted more abstracted representation of the images they subsequently lose clarity. This mimics the way these things are inevitably lost in translation over long periods of time.
GlogauAIR Project
I am planning to further develop my expression of the impacts of colonialism on individualized culture. This project will focus more on the aspect of this concept that addresses the similarities between the structure of this contemporary society based around capitalism and the Empirical nature of colonialism. Drawing the comparison between the forced cultural assimilation bestowed unto the indigenous at the hands of colonialists and the barriers that are created around us by the very nature of capitalist society. I want to create an installation that is composed of two small divergent yet similar spaces that flow into one another creating unity through the juxtaposition of valued and devalued objects. To create a visual narrative of the evolution from colonialism to capitalism and the complications that have been born from it.
CV Summary
b. 1988, United States
Education
- 2011 BFA, Painting, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia
Work Experience
- 2005-2006 Art Teacher’s Assistant, Wilde Lake High School, Columbia, Maryland
- 2015 Events Assistant, ESB Mexican American Cultural Center, Austin, Texas
Group Exhibitions
- 2011 Identity Redux, Mr. Beast Gallery, Savannah, Georgia
- 2014 Variety Show, Badlands, Austin, Texas
- 2015 Paper Jam, Bone Black Print Studio, Austin,Texas
- 2015 East Austin Studio Tour, Big Medium, Austin, Texas
Publications
Gallery
