A German-born artist’s first solo show transfigures residue from newspapers distributed each week along the sinuous corridor of Highway 101.
Artist Carolina Franzen — who uses the professional sobriquets Caro and aC Hömmken — collected cardboard packaging used to bundle printed copies of the Coast Reporter. The tawny sheets became the substrate for her series of wax-illuminated works now displayed at the Gibsons and District Public Library.
“I love newsprint — that’s part of the paradox; I’m not reading online,” said Franzen. “But one day I walked by and saw all these huge cards that are left behind for recycling, literally packaging material. I think that as awareness about sustainability increases, we trick ourselves a little bit with this idea of recycling: it’s just another mode of excess. It’s big machinery with consequences.”
The ersatz canvases are reinforced with cedar fencing material. Franzen uses wax crayons from local thrift stores to draw serpentine lines that echo wood grain erased by the fibre’s manufacture. The result is an abstract style in which landscapes emerge from the amalgam of zigzag strands.
In Hole in the Sky, one of a dozen pieces mounted around the library’s perimeter, dense textures recede to form an irregularly-shaped void. At its centre, a blazing hemisphere suggests a celestial orb.
“We look at the beauty of the sky, not thinking about what is missing and what we have destroyed, as human beings, in the atmosphere,” said Franzen, who moved to the Sunshine Coast six years ago. “I’m not trying to push things onto people; I’m trying to maybe access their minds a little bit through the titles. Otherwise I do speak through materiality most.”
The emotional burden of environmental destruction is woven throughout Franzen’s works. In Homeless Cloud, unsettled vapours surround a lonely mountain peak. Oppressive darkness encircles a spectral shaft of colour in Lightfall.
The vacant plinth depicted in Deconstructed Monument is linked to Franzen’s recent academic research. In 2021, sitting in the same library where her artworks are now displayed, she completed her PhD thesis for the University of British Columbia’s Germanic Studies department: Impossible Subjectivities: Negative Agency and the Biopolitical Order of Nazism.
“In the end, it’s about what we worship in colonial ways,” said Franzen. “Having all these statues of horses and pedestals [depicting] people who might have brought a nation forward but who also destroyed lives. How we think about society has to include the past.”
Among the dozen wax and fibre works is a three-dimensional installation that some library patrons have mistaken for exposed plumbing. The convoluted pipework of her sculpture carries an irony-drenched title. The German words Kinder Morgan, Franzen explained, translates to “children of tomorrow.”
Still, a theme of hopeful reinvention is woven through the exhibition. Blue nameplates next to each artwork are in fact repurposed paperwork from framing materials purchased at Gibsons Building Supplies.
“This show, I would say, has made me an artist,” observed Franzen. She has previously contributed to group shows in Vancouver, Gibsons and Sechelt. “Before, I was a person who also made art. And now I can say I’m an artist because this is what I put out into a public space.”
The artworks by Carolina Franzen (a.k.a. Caro and aC Hömmken) are featured at the Gibsons and District Public Library until the end of July.
