The Color of Absence by Fran Forman

Over the past few years, I have noticed a sense of absence, disconnection, and disquiet permeating my life and those around me. Creating constructed visual narratives allows me to express visually what I cannot articulate with words:

How do you describe Absence?

Absence comes in many conflicting forms – longing despite proximity, loneliness within the sunny illusion of domestic tranquility, shadows on a sunny day, realism with illusion. As a story-teller, I create these cinematic tableaux to grapple with and express ambiguities. Each image is a separate story, immediately personal.

My visual narratives expand on the noir tradition of exposing fragility, longing, and lost kinship. I place my subjects in uncertain settings, just out of reach of companionship. They are as elusive as a shadow or are absorbed in their interior lives. The play of light within a shadowy space - with its evocation of silence - gradually brings on a sense of existential isolation. An empty space suggests an absence or the liminal space between this world and the next. Geometry, especially in the use of rectangles and diagonals, seem to suggest a sense of stability, refuge, and a solid foundation, but it can't submerge one's sense of unease. Vibrant fantasies trap viewers in a distorted perception of time and space, eventually offering an 'escape hatch' by way of a lit window, a mirror, or door left ajar.






Fran Forman
Fran's photo-montage images have been referred to as photo-paintings, and her distinctive award-winning images, resplendent with color and mystery, are generally recognized as 'the work of Fran Forman''.

Her background as a painter, therapist and graphic designer, and her life-long interest in art history, is reflected in her complex and provocative images that explore themes of solitude and disconnection endemic these days in American life. Her staged scenes integrate and juxtapose realism with illusion, longing with disconnection and are suspended in vibrant fantasies that hint at ambiguities. Yet always a slash of light offers a measure of hope.

Fran's process of creating her 'photo-paintings' is unusual. While her images suggest the fracturing and disconnection of relationships, her method suggests the opposite. She photographs disparate people and settings during her extensive travels over years. Back in her studio, she digitally melds and connects fragments, sometimes chosen at random, to create a story. She works like a choreographer, trying various configurations and relationships, until the pieces fit together like a completed jigsaw puzzle. The process is entirely organic and intuitive. She has found over time that despite starting with disparate pieces and settings and visually linking them together, the human emotions in her visual narratives are indeed universal.

Her method hearkens back to the Surrealist painters who relied on the consequences of happy accidents, chance and the unconscious to inform their compositional development and whose techniques evoked the union of dream and reality, ultimately subverting traditional ways of seeing.

Her work resides in many private collections as well the permanent collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (Washington, DC), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Grace Museum (Texas), the Sunnhordland Museum (Norway), Western Carolina University Fine Art Museum, the Comer Collection at the University of Texas, and the County Down Museum (Northern Ireland). In addition to the collage artists of the last century, she is heavily influenced by Caravaggio, Jacub Schikaneder, Vilhelm Hammershoi, Edward Hopper, Gregory Crewdson, and film noir cinematographers.
www.franforman.com
@franforman
All about Fran Forman





Exhibition history
Fran has had many solo exhibitions, including The Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock Abbey, a National Trust site in England, The Massachusetts State House, The Griffin Museum of Photography, AfterImage Gallery (Dallas), the University of North Dakota, Galeria Photo/Graphica (San Miguel d'Allende, Mexico), Sohn Fine Art Gallery (Lenox), OpenShutter Gallery (Dorango, Colorado), several colleges, and the Pucker Gallery (Boston), as well as many two-person and group shows. She has been honored with many awards, artist residencies, an Honorary Degree from the New England School of Photography, magazine and book features, monographs, and speaking engagements. In 2022 she was among the Top 50 in PhotoLucida's Critical Mass.




The Color of Absence by Elin Spring , Editor, Publisher, What Will You Remember, 2.16.23
Fran Forman has long explored the elusive realm of our dreams, fears and internal conflicts in her surreal photographic compositions. Her newest series “The Color of Absence,'' mines the strata of global and personal strains that have plagued us in recent years. Utilizing a library of her photographs made in enchanting and sometimes exotic environments, Forman works intuitively to craft scenarios whose allure belies a permeating sense of imbalance. She builds theatrical tension in formally designed frames that use geometric elements, space, and the separation of objects and people to convey isolation. This disquieting message is suffused in radiant, luscious hues. But her narratives also possess a classic “noir'' aesthetic with their contrasty interplay of light and shadows. The combined effect seems to suspend time, accentuating the feeling that something is about to happen. While her subjects' gestures convey expectancy and longing, hope always insinuates itself in metaphors for possibility like windows and doorways. Forman's rich layering of visual elements crescendo in dramatic fantasies that echo our deepest emotional yearnings.