Artist Lecture no. 6: Francis Cape

 I attended Francis Cape's artist lecture presented by the sculpture department in the VCU commons. I was a couple minutes late and felt behind and unsure the entire time. His process seems inaccessible and his work, rather far from my understanding of the medium. I was not sure if I had missed some very important introduction/ explanation of his work, or if it was some disconnect occurring due to the distance of woodwork to my medium of photography. 

He is a British artist living in upstate New York, about 2 hours from Wall Street and his work centers on social awareness, and political ideas. His speaking was laborious, in all the lectures I've attended he presented the least amount of slides, he just talked so slowly, not necessarily carefully, or intentionally- just slowly, so that I was anxiously waiting for more visual clues to his "point." It didn't take long until I was no longer anxiously awaiting the images to progress, as they seemed to go over my head. Perhaps it is an ingrained politeness of myself that when something does not make sense, or generally seems boring, I chalk it up to being higher than my learning, that my ignorance must be blocking out the lovely nature an artwork is trying to speak about. I'm unsure if this was the case with Francis Cape's lecture. 

He is interested in our government's reaction to Katrina, or lack thereof, and makes commentary on our government's (un)involvement in social disasters. I connected most with his "Waterline" series from 2005. He walked through the neighborhood of Gentilly and noticed an eerie silence in what was a middle class anytown, USA community. He made images of the houses, all with a matching waterline, and hung them in the gallery stringing that line together. He also took note of the wainscoting he continuously observed in Louisiana, painted, or not, and recreated it in the gallery, insuring the height of the paneling corresponded with the height of the water that rushed through Louisiana. 

He also has made images of his town, a lower class area of upstate New York who's dilapidated state could easily be confused with a place that had a hurricane tear through it. His photographs were accompanied with replicas of the Utility Furniture Scheme which was a program that existed in Britain from 1942- 1951, as he mentions on his website, it "was the last example of the link between  furniture design and social idealism; a history that started with William Morris in Britain, continued with Bauhaus, then De Stijl, and was taken up in Scandinavia, before returning to Britain. Design is no longer seen as part of a larger scheme for social improvement; the material itself is the end." His work takes off from here into finely crafted woodwork, meant to last, into a world I could not connect with.