Francine Funke
Through the Grass Darkly

Mixed Greens is pleased to present Through the Grass Darkly, a site-specific window installation by Francine Funke. As an extension of the artist’s Mechanical Botanical series, archival digital prints on vinyl fill the glass with abstracted plants, creating a discourse between the existing organic qualities of biological forms and the synthetic manipulation of them into increasingly unfamiliar strokes.

Funke’s previous three-dimensional works on paper illustrate nature motifs as ornamental elements in an interior space. A room is made intimate and recognizable though the saturation of florid textile patterns in the style of Art Nouveau and blossoming bouquets – pivotal imagery in her artistic practice. The Mechanical Botanical series focuses solely on the plants, highlighting their ever-developing, changing, and mutating presence by digitally rendering the images.

In Through the Grass Darkly, Funke’s use of digital mechanization is an eschewal from her previously straightforward depiction of nature. Using photographs of plants against a black background removes them from the context of thriving organisms in symbiotic relationships, and places them in a manufactured environment ready for human examination. The photographs are altered, transforming them into innovations of scientific exploration. The artist’s technological interference in the stable biotic structure of the plants discloses a fascination with the vitality of nature while simultaneously questioning the consequence in the synthesis of organic and industrially constructed life.

Francine Funke received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Cornell University School of Art, Architecture, and Planning, Ithaca, NY, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Hunter College in New York City. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Fort Lauderdale, FL; Scottsdale Center for the Arts, AZ; the rotunda of the Russell Senate Building, Washington, DC; and a solo display in the windows of Tiffany & Co. on Fifth Avenue, NYC. Group exhibition venues include the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Parrish Art Museum, Watermill, NY; Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY; Discovery Museum, Bridgeport, CT; Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT; George Segal Gallery at Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ; Gallery of Contemporary Art at Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, CT; and the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, CT.

For more information, please visit francinefunke.com


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