Category: Drawings

Upcoming Events: Fresno and Orlando

Two major events in the coming month.

“Beyond Suspect Sketches: Art’s history and future in death investigation” brings together the departments of Art and Public Safety at Valencia College on March 3.

In this multi-media workshop, participants will learn about Frances Glessner Lee, the mother of American forensic science, who used her skills as an artist to create the Nutshell studies of Unexplained Death- which are still used to train detectives today.

Hosted by the School of Public Safety in partnership with Carlye Frank, Professor of Art at Valencia College’s East Campus, the event will include a screening of the documentary “Of Dolls and Murder,” a discussion of the role of art objects as investigative tools, and the opportunity to examine Nutshell Studies produced by Prof Frank’s Design II class.

If you’re in Orlando, don’t miss it!

“Thresholds in Parameters of What it is to Be…,” an exciting exhibition curated by the inimitable Jamie Nakagawa Boley, will include an installation of my work, “The Missing Missing: California.” The show is on view in California State University, Fresno’s M Street gallery until Feb 16.

True Crime Theatre: Hell’s Belle

True Crime Theatre is a multi-media immersive performance bringing the feel of radio dramas and podcasts into the live arena of arts. Two live actors weave the tale of Belle Gunness supported by live foley artists as well as a live sketch artist, who brings to life missing persons posters in real time. The audience is surrounded by subtle art installations of various artifacts connected to the crimes and vanishing of one of America’s earliest female serial killers.

Written and directed by Kevin G Becker, live drawing by CS Frank.

MFA Work, Fall 2017

I tend to work in series, in multiples. As with the ongoing Dante Project, I also work with developing processes, producing both art and a record or archive of a developing skill. Language, visual language. Motion. The work in drawing and in audio exists in liminal spaces, in the thin boundaries between drawing and investigation, the thin boundaries between language systems.

The fingerprint images function both as traditional drawings, and as markers of motion; fingerprints stand in for individuality, for identity. The idea that only one person could have made these prints is both useful and reductive. It’s also false. Fingerprints must be interpreted into meaning, and are assigned identity based on what are called points of comparison. These points of comparison are subjective, debatable, and always moving.

So too, these images. I think they work best when they suggest motion, something that has already happened but is still happening. When they suggest, rather than describe. To apprehend a subject is to catch a person, to stop that person from performing an action by taking them into your custody. To apprehend an idea or an image is to understand it, to stop it from shifting in your perception, to catch it through naming and describing, by constructing a narrative. Yes, this. And then this. And then this.