Current

"Peregrine was great..."

So he would hear. In his kitchen in Milwaukee, the artist Nicholas Frank had repeated to himself, sometimes loudly, other times quietly, even just the word "Peregrine." He had wondered first of all, about the abridgement of the name of that artist-run space in Chicago, and what was it really, for he had never been, Peregrine Program, or Projects, or something like that. Over drinks with his friends, he would also often hear the name Edmund, Edmund the guy who ran the gallery, and almost believe this person existed. Once, the morning after beers at the Polish Falcon bar, he woke to the thought that he might have met the Peregrine Edmund. That they had talked about painting, paintings, language, substance, skeletons, flesh, fiber, memory, beings; that the night before they had shaken hands; and they had agreed they were not able to tell the other artist apart from their project. Nicholas Hermetic Gallery Frank was convinced that this was the Peregrine Program Edmund he had bought a pint for.

In the subsequent months -- still unsure when they had exactly first met -- Frank would conceive a staging of "ghosts" to this new relationship for he believed that was how some artists existed. First he ghosted drawings by Peregrine Edmund; drawings made with cast-offs, including an old discarded library book, overstock fabric, and mirrors from a thrift-store. And then he imaged images of Edmund's sculpture; images of a blue object made with seashells and starfish, photographed against fur. And further, he witnessed the pedestal to that sculpture, a Greek column-inspired construction of wood and paint, in white, blue and gold. The artist Nicholas Frank borrowed, sat on (in broad daylight), played with (in the dark), and captured something of some things by the Edmund that ran the Peregrine Program, and presently, he would set down his coffee, grab his bags, lock the door, and he would drive, Milwaukee to Chicago, to Peregrine Program, to say...

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Nicholas Frank presents "Peregrine was great..." on Sunday, May 5, 2013 from 1-4 pm.
Exhibition runs through June 9.