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Current Art Works

Fran Benton works in a number of media. She mixes and crosses media as the project dictates. Currently Fran has painting and drawing works in 3 separate projects - Landscape Series, Surveillance Series, and Dadwar.

"The new works are from three different projects. The landscape and surveillance projects are paintings and have thematic connections. “Dadwar” is an installation work with oil bar drawings over prints, digital photograaphy, and a textile floor piece.
Landscape

"The landscape series has come from my interest in how we live in the designed urban landscape and the struggle to retain control of that landscape. I have taken the forms and actions derived from the physical process of working in the landscape. Recently I have done a lot of video work. I use video to generate stills for the drawings and paintings. I combine these with found images and video stills.
My background as a field biologist also shaped the content of the landscape series. I always wanted to reshape the urban landscape surroundings to imitate the fantasy of real wilderness. After 10 years of living in Langford, a severely overdeveloped suburb of Victoria, I came to realize there is no more wilderness. We have touched and smeared it all. I am learning to get over it."

 

Surveillance
The surveillance series comes an old photo of my Aunt jan. She was a nurse and in the 1940's it was a common task to go downtown Victoria and "Tag" for donations for the hospital. The image of my aunt surrounded by suspicious looking men prompted me to search for or recreate similar images. With reference to the film process I started to look for imagery of people being watched and documented. Some of the images are historical; some are from my own experience. The paintings are a combination of layers of painted and printed imagery.

 

Dadwar
“Dadwar” is an ongoing project. It comes from the discovery of my father’s World War 2 photo album. I remember him gathering his war friends together and going lovingly over each photo recounting stories and remembered events. Many years after my father's passing I located the book and began to explore the imagery. This book is a sustained reflection on the experience of a Canadian soldier in Europe during World War 2.
Who were the people in these pictures and what did they mean to him?
As a strategy to reinvest life into the album, I layered the images onto a series of existing drawings of surfaces and structures from European history.
The war images merge and muddy the drawings - this matches my memory of his friends and his stories. They all merge together into a kind of historical and personal miasma that is, in the end, just a constructed fiction.
The images are oil bar over toner transfer. They are placed beside the original photographs from his album. This project is work in progress at this time and has a number of components being added to it. The images are all about 35 x 80 inches.