Derek Franklin: Grief is on my calendar everyday at 2:00 p.m.

"If we were to look back toward ancient humans and throw every artifact into two categories, there are the artifacts of human survival and artifacts of power and the state. The vernacular objects in our homes and other sites are used to heal together, build community, create family, and to perform the rituals, care, and love we need to keep going and survive the external forces of the state and other forms of collective violence. I believe these everyday sites and objects are witness to our struggles, awkwardness, achievements, and failure as humans. I believe these objects are imbued with all of this and thus will allow future peoples to understand us the way we understand our ancestors through the objects they used. Essentially, I am interested in how the interior and domestic spaces of our lives are communally used as a site of resistance to external forces."

He focuses on specific actions: the daily rituals of care that may include food and drink or the arrangement of flowers plucked from the garden. In Franklin’s layered paintings, the aperture of the spotlight framing the vase or plate punctures the surface of both painting and the remains of the performance it depicts, revealing it as performance. But the images simultaneously reflect Franklin’s respect and affection for the objects that he sees as being imbued with the stories of the people who live with them. He sees these not as interchangeable props, but specific objects that bear witness to the lives of their owners.