Proof

Mark Franchino’s work explores our constructions of everyday environments and events, and the nature of human dynamics that evolve within, around, and through them. His work addresses seemingly mundane spaces and activities as physical constructions that reinforce and perpetuate implicit value systems. What are the rules? What purpose do they serve?

In the Proof series, “cloud” images were generated from of an organization of randomized patterns created by a computer program. Those images were then rendered in 3D software and moved through time. As in the youthful game of finding images in clouds, Franchino selected the ones in which he could “see” something and then printed the images in subtle shades of white and iridescent ink through halftone patterns. The clouds are at once present and absent. The images alluded to in their titles are fictions, as is the notion that they are anything more than random.

Mark Franchino received a BFA in 1998 from the State University of New York at Buffalo and a MFA from the University of Delaware in 2002. In the last 10 years his works have been shown in more than fifty group and solo exhibitions in the US and internationally, including exhibitions at the Universität der Künste in Berlin, Germany; the Print Center in Philadelphia, PA; and the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art. He has received numerous awards including the H. Douglas Pickering Memorial Award and purchase prizes from Lessedra Gallery in Sophia, Bulgaria and the Amity Art Foundation in Connecticut. Recent visiting artists lectures have been given at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA. Currently, Franchino is an Associate Professor of Art in the Art Department at Clarion University of Pennsylvania. Previously he was an Assistant Curator and the Print Studio Coordinator at the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, ND where he organized an international artist residency program. Franchino, originally from Long Island, N.Y., now lives in Clarion, PA.