THE FRANKLIN PARTY
2003
collaboration
This was a collaborative experiment made with Philadelphia poet Jena Osman, based on her then poem-in-progress The Franklin Party. This was done while in residence together in 2003 at the La Napoule Art Foundation. A link to a more recent version of Osman’s poem is here.
The drawings I contributed were informed by Osman’s writing, and were part of a cycle investigating the navigation of language and iconography, as filtered through the ill-fated 1848 Franklin Party expedition that attempted to navigate the Northwest Passage through the Arctic.
As installed in the gallery, each sheet of paper (either a portion of the poem, or a drawing) functioned as something like an ice floe, shifting and transforming, against a dark, oceanic blue backdrop.