Everything We Carry

By Kelly Jean Egan

Dolby Chadwick Gallery is thrilled to announce Everything We Carry, an exhibition of new paintings by Sherié Franssen.

There is something wonderfully unreliable about memory. A small detail can remain astonishingly clear while everything around it softens. A color, a shape, a feeling can return without warning, sometimes more vivid than the original moment itself. Sherié Franssen’s newest body of work seems to inhabit this space, where impressions gather, shift and resurface, and where what we see is shaped as much by what we bring to it as by what is actually there.

These paintings are abundant. Color moves freely across the canvases, sometimes in broad sweeps and elsewhere in quick, concentrated marks. Forms overlap, collide and emerge through layers of paint, occasionally arriving at something that feels strangely familiar before slipping away again. Franssen has deliberately removed the hints of the figure that have appeared in previous bodies of work, allowing accident and instinct greater freedom in their place. Much of what happens on the canvas is unexpected, discovered in the process rather than planned in advance. There is a generosity in this openness. Franssen gives the eye plenty to discover without insisting on what should be found, allowing each viewer’s own associations to become part of the experience.

Amid all this activity are passages of surprising tenderness. Flesh tones meet electric greens, blues, reds and pinks; quieter moments are held within areas of intensity. This body of work is more chaotic than what has come before, but also, by Franssen’s own account, her most emotional. The paintings can feel full almost to excess, yet somehow remain sensitive to what is not there. Absence does not appear as emptiness, but as something woven into the abundance. We can miss something and still feel surrounded by it. We can carry what is no longer immediately present without being consumed by its absence.

Perhaps this is where memory becomes less about looking backward and more about what we continue to carry forward. People, places and experiences settle into us, informing how we see and respond long after a particular moment has passed. With time, certain details sharpen while others recede. New experiences mingle with old ones. What remains is not a perfect record, but something living, capable of changing alongside us.

Franssen does not ask these paintings to resolve those contradictions. Instead, she seems increasingly willing to let uncertainty into their making, trusting the accident that arrives when she is not looking and following it somewhere she may not have intended to go. There is pleasure here too: in color, movement, instinct and the freedom of not knowing exactly what something is. These paintings remind us that uncertainty need not be an empty place. It can be fertile ground, filled with everything we have known, everything we carry, and everything still waiting to take shape.

Sherié Franssen was born in Long Beach, California, in 1952 and earned her BFA in Drawing and Painting from California State University, Long Beach. Her work has been exhibited in museum and gallery shows across the country, including in HEADS, a 2011 exhibition curated by Peter Selz. Her art has been reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, and Art Ltd. This is Franssen’s ninth solo show at the Dolby Chadwick Gallery.