ALICIA FRAMIS

Framis is an artist whose work is defined by the specific contexts in which it dwells, often using participation and social praxis to highlight systemic issues within the larger world that exists beyond the exhibition environment, but which nevertheless plays an important role in shaping it. The porous boundaries between individuals and artworks are vital to Framis’ work, as is the relationship between subjects and the organizational structures that influence their thoughts and behavior. In LEAVE HERE YOUR FEARS, Framis instantiates a kind of occasion for interaction with her audience, allowing individual visitors to externalize and concretize their deepest fears and deposit them in the hopes that they will be transformed into paintings that give form to the exhibition; more than participating, visitors effectively become co-creators alongside Framis.

The impetus behind LEAVE HERE YOUR FEARS was, in part, the growth of anxiety and root fear nowadays. Framis does not propose that this introspective period be somehow erased. On the contrary, there is a generosity in Framis’ appeal to record and share each individual’s own fears, giving space to those feelings while also using them as source material for further construction, inciting a mobility of thoughts and trepidations, bearing witness to their recoding, as simply something else. This is a mode of artmaking that is at once deeply personal and simultaneously profoundly social, a process of providing an occasion for those two spheres to meld in productive and restorative tension with one another.