Artist: Derek Franklin
Exhibition title: Gray Minstrel
Venue: Carl & Sloan Contemporary, Portland, US
Date: June 18 – August 2, 2015
Photography: images courtesy of the artist and Carl & Sloan Contemporary, Portland
Carl & Sloan Contemporary is pleased to present Gray Minstrel, New York artist Derek Franklin’s first solo exhibition in Portland, Oregon in eight years. Gray Minstrel includes new paintings and sculptures and opens Thursday, June 18, 2015, 6–10pm and will run until August 2.
Let us be intimate with our ancestral ghosts
Sing the songs that old women used to sing
And blow a communal wind that unites a germ traveling to communion
There was a partition where our dominance pulled the gems
From your ground imbued with witness
This partition, identical to the screen created by water
Between the crayfish and me, exists all of my love for you
Joined only by the yarn, cast to procure desire
Like the soft violence of the piper
The odd stillness of the bodies wrenched out
Excite in ways that feel anointed
Like the cinematic I eat from the feed
Our arms were given to us to carry the impressions
Which swing to imitations
For current MINSTRELS
That Turkey Trot Abhorrence into our lives
without a trace
Gumbo C and XXII Slaps, 2015
Rocky XXXVII: Cleaners III, 2015
Rocky XXXV: Cleaners II, 2015
Lawrence IV: Vaudeville Slap, 2015
Communal Wind, 2015
The Straw That Fractured Our Back, 2015
Gumbo C and XXII Slaps, 2015
Asger IV, 2014
Lawrence II: Street Orator, 2015