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Opening Friday, February 12: Dawit Petros, Janet Lobberecht

Franklin Art Works is pleased to present solo exhibitions by Dawit L. Petros and Jannet Lobberecht, opening on Friday, February 11 with a reception from 6-8pm. Admission is free. Exhibitions will remain on view until Saturday, March 26.  

 In the Main Gallery  
Dawit L. Petros 

The Eritean-born, Brooklyn-based artist will premier four multi-panel photographic works created during his recent travels to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and Dakar, Senegal. The selected pieces are “Site Specific Abstractions,” works invested in issues of color, process and abstraction, while rooted in the singularities of a particular space. By using a highly formal language to investigate place, a parallel strategy for applying photography and extrapolating the histories of a specific location are proposed. 

Two 24-panel works, Addis/Chromes and Dakar/Chromes, are projects rooted in photography that that encompass painting, sculpture, architecture and installation. The working strategy involves a series of walks in which photographs of color and related objects such as architectural fragments, fabrics, and refuse are collected. These photographs are transferred to the computer and their colors are sampled to create monochromatic fields. The final components are close-up images of the walls of buildings that border the neighborhoods in which the walks occur.

Accompanying these works are a new single channel video and two large triptychs, Demarcation (A Line In The Sand) and Demarcation (Sea Transfer).  The triptychs are derived from a set of discrete performances by the artist carried out in Ethiopia and Senegal. 

Dawit L. Petros received a BFA from Concordia University (Montreal) and  MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  He has exhibited internationally at venues including the Royal Ontario Museum, the Addis Ababa Biennial, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, PPOW Gallery, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., and the University of California, Irvine.  Petros is represented by Alexander Gray Associates.

Also on view Janet Lobberecht: Sectionals

The Minneapolis-based artist will premier a series of digital prints, titled Sectionals.  The works are composed using an accumulation of cast off tape used by the artist in the drawing practice.

In her drawings, Lobberecht uses tape to erase areas of graphite, lifting off areas of graphite and paper. These sections of tape thereby gather marks and paper that are in themselves evidence of prior action or performance, and art making - becoming a print itself of her drawings at various stages of completion.

For the prints on view, Lobberecht used the tape to create new compositions, resulting in digital prints.  Lobberecht states, I think of this archive as sectionals, sections not only of the original drawing but also of the paper itself..The [prints] can be seen as layers of sections of an unrepresented whole.

Janet Lobberecht received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has exhibited at venues including the Rochester Art Center, Art of This Gallery, Interact, Rosalux Gallery, University of Minnesota, Soo Visual Arts and the Burnet Gallery at the Chambers Hotel. She is the recipient of artist fellowships from the Jerome Foundation and McKnight Foundation.