Frances Lightbound: Tectonics at the John David Mooney Foundation, Chicago, Sept. 21 – October 29, 2023.
Essay: Pia Singh, Frances Lightbound's Tectonics (The Drouth)
Tectonics is about things in process; objects out of place and/or out of time. About buildings as condensations of human and non-human activity. About navigating tides of sensation while being occasionally anchored to islands of familiarity; about objects and spaces that rhyme. As a vandal let loose in the library of the metropolis, Lightbound uses architecture as a lens to examine spatio-temporal relationships between bodies, built spaces and landforms, rearranging aspects for one to lose authority against the backdrop of the other. The exhibition becomes an intimate act of readership on the magnetic nature of materiality in the medium of building.
Tectonics presents a series of anecdotal installations, incorporating print, sculpture, drawing, and site-responsive works on paper. Variable screen print editions take a single photographic image as their starting point; their surfaces threatening to evolve through ongoing, iterative processes. Salvaged architectural fragments from elsewhere are sent off on new voyages, thickening their associative dexterity. Heavyweight graphite rubbings formed through Lightbound’s sustained bodily engagement with the gallery, shift paper to sculptural relief. Relativizing meaning and transforming trace materials like graphite to breaking point (where meaning is lost and found) the works encourage a deeper consideration of surface and structure, deconstructing and at times collapsing, human and geologic timelines to redistribute raw materials toward more salient truths; towards elemental nature and the enigmatic charge of spatial gesture.
Photographs by Bob.