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Abigail Frankfurt was born in New York in 1973. A self-taught artist, she utilizes visual and tactile free association to create powerful mixed media collages; unique “maquettes" that are ultimately translated into large scale photographic prints.
A central concern in Frankfurt’s practice is the intersection of image and writing; the hybrid territory where both artforms meet. Hence, language is either embedded within her works or springs from them into adjacent prose poems.
Not properly medicated for bipolar disorder until the age of 42, Frankfurt originally started making collages as a coping mechanism. “The sensory experience cracked open my imagination like an egg flung out an open window,” the artist says.
She began gathering abandoned magazines, comic books, photographs, buttons, pills, candy, toys, hardware, vintage porn, old postcards, metro-cards, pressed flowers, googly eyes... At the heart of her process is the therapeutic act of ripping paper and transforming faces, bodies, and settings through the layering and juxtaposition of these found materials. Then, using matte gel, acrylic paint, gouache, and sometimes oil, she creates settings that allow her characters the freedom and playfulness to exist in their own worlds; atmospheric narratives full of joy and pathos.
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"My mind wants to take care of my mind. I talk to the images. I play with them like Barbie dolls. I ask them what do they want to wear? Where do they want to go? I am able to give myself permission to make mistakes. I move my hands until my mind softens—until the hard edges of anxiety and auditory intensity quiet. My doctor says it is like wrapping gauze around my brain—gives me some extra padding."
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c-print | edition of two
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"In the kitchen while my mother cooked we put cake cloches over our heads and walked around the room pretending to be aliens: 'take me to your leader'—colanders worked well too—my mother was surrounded. She protected herself from the great invasion with stories about the dust bowl and Marlon Brando in The Wild One—toe shoes that crippled her feet, grandfather's loaded pitching arm and running away from the west"
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"He was full of shake and superstition. His bathroom had no ceiling—he said he was a writer but he had no hands, he said he loved the opera—but his ears were missing—he said 'I am a gardener.' The plants were all dead. I told him 'I am many things too'—I am falling backwards almost everyday—I am stuck in an elevator trapped in terrible conversation—I am running away from you and the fire you are about to light"
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"a woman crawled up my fire escape and whispered through my kitchen window: 'my life has been too long;' a starless black night, not battered—rather, burned."
ABIGAIL FRANKFURT: ABSOLUTELY COO COO: Online Exclusive
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