Frank Poor: Enon Cemetery
Main Street Sculpture Project
February 7 to May 24, 2009
Curator: Richard Klein
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum’s tenth Main Street Sculpture Project is an ambitious installation that takes the form of a nineteenth-century cemetery. Located in a transitional area between the Museum, the neighboring church, and Ridgefield’s historic district, Frank Poor’s Enon Cemetery looks as though it has been there for years.
The memory-laden work—which will be on view through May 24, 2009—serves as a concrete reminder of the cycle of birth and death, reminding passersby how all of our lives are inexorably linked, and how art, spirituality, and history all contribute to the values that we hold dear.
The project is based on a graveyard in Woodstock, Georgia, the small community where the artist was born and grew up. The installation is composed of twenty-one life-size grave markers—some over fifteen feet tall—each referencing an actual marker in the cemetery; the design covering each of the hand-painted plywood markers is based on a blown-up fragment of text and imagery found on the specific gravestone portrayed.
Aldrich exhibitions director Richard Klein says, “Although the process for the artist is a very personal one—numerous relatives are interred in the cemetery—Poor’s abstraction of the original information found on each marker has made the work more universal, transforming the spirit of the specific location and those memorialized into a more general meditation on the passing of time.”
Enon Cemetery has been installed so that the primary vantage point from which to view it is the Museum’s Camera Obscura. Klein continues, “The Camera Obscura’s soft focus, together with its dark and monochromatic nature, has created a hauntingly beautiful image of the installation that amplifies the sense of loss inherent in the work. The image created by the Camera transports the viewer back in time, to both Enon Cemetery’s founding in the early nineteenth century and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century past of the Museum’s neighborhood.”
Frank Poor comments, “This is the first time I have ever shown the markers outdoors and it is important that they appear to belong to the site. The Aldrich installation was a little bit stealth since we placed the primarily white markers in the garden while there was still snow on the ground. At first they were altogether unnoticeable, but seemed to emerge as the snow melted and the grass began to show. I am interested in the viewer’s response over time as the installation appears, runs its course, and is removed. I hope to produce a kind of afterimage that mirrors the sense of loss and displacement that led to the work in the first place.”
additional images | click to enlarge
 |
 |
 |
Frank Poor: Enon Cemetery—Main Street Sculpture Project
Frank Poor, Enon Cemetery (installation view at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield), 2009
Courtesy of the artist
Frank Poor: Enon Cemetery—Main Street Sculpture Project
Frank Poor, Enon Cemetery (installation view at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield), 2009
Courtesy of the artist
Frank Poor: Enon Cemetery—Main Street Sculpture Project
Frank Poor, Enon Cemetery (installation view from the Camera Obscura Gallery at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield), 2009
Courtesy of the artist
The Artist:
Frank Poor was born in Woodstock, Georgia, in 1962. He received his BFA from Georgia State University and MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Recent solo exhibitions include Shadows and Signs, Coastal Carolina University, Conway, SC (2007) and Time, Memory and the Poetic Impulse, Salve Regina University, Newport, R.I. (2005). A body of work was recently included in the DeCordova Annual Exhibition, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA (2006). The work Hardware (2006) from that exhibition was purchased for the museum’s collection.
The Aldrich is supported, in part, by the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.
Frank Poor, Enon Cemetery (installation view at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield), 2009
Courtesy of the artist
