The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Frank Poor's memory-laden outdoor work, non-Cemetery, is based on a graveyard in Woodstock, Georgia, the small community where the artist was born and grew up. Composed of over 20 life-size grave markers (some over 15 feet tall), each element in the installation references an actual marker in the cemetery. The patterns on each of the hand-painted plywood markers are blown-up fragments of the text found on each specific gravestone. Although the process for the artist is a very personal one (numerous relatives are interred in the cemetery), the abstraction of the text makes the work more universal, evoking the spirit of the displaced burial ground. The markers will be installed so the primary view of them is from the Museum's Camera Obscura, with the dark and ethereal image further amplifying the sense of time's passage inherent in the work.