Dixie Compass (top left), Crab and Crow (bottom left) and Flying Fish and Nike are

among the more than 25 pieces in the exhibit, Ke Francis: Biloxi to Babylon, opening Oct. 19 at Florida Mining Gallery.

Fables of the Reconstruction

KE FRANCIS: BILOXI TO BABYLON
7-10 p.m. Oct. 19; on display through Dec. 6 Florida Mining Gallery, 5300 Shad Road, Southside 425-2845, oridamininggallery.com

Ke Francis transforms Southern storytelling into visionary art

porch, where his dad would play the ddle while his grandfather joined in on harmonica and guitar. I think that music and folk art were my closest connections to any art, Francis said. All the neighbors would come over, and people would be drinking bourbon and telling really great and outrageous stories. I believe that experience was really pivotal, especially with inspiring my own creative writing. Both his grandfather and uncle created art in their free time, yet while the family encouraged his talents, they also urged him to focus on more sensible aspirations. ere was always this sense of the rational versus the intuitive. [Laughs.] Francis eventually le Tupelo and earned a Bachelor of Fine Art in sculpture from the Cleveland Institute of Art. In the early 70s, Francis and his wife Mary had a daughter and returned to Tupelo, where they built a compound that included their home, workspaces, a woodshop and a ceramics studio, on a 32-acre piece of lakeside property. It was during this time that the couple began publishing their own books, and Francis honed his skills as a visual polymath, creating colorful ruminations in varying media that, in hindsight, seem to weave a grand and connected fable. Francis work taps into a kind of dusty Gnosticism played out on the unforgiving waters and tornado-ravaged atlands of the Mississippi hill country, as humans and animals are ung together in the a ermath of natural disasters, carried along on a raging sea of color, text, crosshatching and recurring archetypes. One curious signi er that appears in much of his work (hoopsnakepress.com) is that of the tuning fork. at concept intrigued me due to the idea that there might be a wavelength inside the art; if you hit one tuning fork, across the room, a similar tuning fork will begin to sound. Francis wondered if some invisible vibration or frequency was formed from the coherence in his own work. I was building di erent things like sculpture, painting and woodcut prints, so the idea that if I had a sculpture sitting in the room, the painting on the wall would begin to hum in some kind of harmony. Another theme is that of a quiet sense of loneliness, as creatures dri along on ra s and roo ops in oodwaters, yet cannot seem to come together for a solution, regardless of how dire their shared condition might be. ey are all on the same small little piece of oating debris, hoping to live, but are disconnected. Francis show, opening this week at Florida Mining Gallery, features 25 to 35 pieces that seem to touch on everything from biological survival to a kind of homespun eschatology. Yet for all these apparent visions of catastrophe and collective anguish, Francis sees a kind of universal hope thats forever born from the brutal and apparently senseless experiences that occur in the a ermath of natural disasters. It is an optimism that touches on the mystical. In the a ermath of these kinds of events, people are immediately made aware of their insigni cance in the whole scheme of things, Francis said, describing a kind of involuntary paradigm shi when many survivors realize that the greatest relationships we have are not with things, but with each other. I like to think that what happens is like a survival of the spirit, a clarifying of priorities, that happens in those moments. e spiritual world is separated from the material world in a beautiful and interesting way, and something new is revealed.
Dan Brown themail@folioweekly.com OCTOBER 16-22, 2012 | FOLIOWEEKLY.com | 63

he narrative thread is sewn through a fabric of dreams and allegory in the singular art of Ke Francis. During the past 30-plus years, this multimedia artist-educator has rendered his stories through an arsenal of media, ranging from painting, printmaking and sculpture to photography and installations. Francis work has been featured in more than 40 solo and group exhibits and is in the public and corporate collections of more than two dozen organizations, ranging from e National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), the High Museum (Atlanta) and the J.P. Getty Museum & Library (Los Angeles). In 1979, Francis and his wife Mary created Hoopsnake Press, which has published 75 editions since its inception. Since 1996, Francis has been the chair of University of Central Floridas art department in Orlando. Madison Ke Francis was born in 1945 in Memphis, Tenn., and grew up in Tupelo, Miss. at sleepy town produced not one but two notable rockabilly singers, most famously Elvis Presley and the lesser-known but still worthy Jumpin Gene Simmons (he of the 1964 novelty hit Haunted House), but its a place not known for its visual artists. e teenaged Francis soaked up the funky vernacular that helped re up his own evolving creative energies. e Francis household didnt own a television until Ke was 13, which meant he absorbed much of his sense of storytelling and propensity for imagined realities rsthand. A er dinner, his family would gather on the